Piped tannoy atmosphere? Too PC for me

MY favourite hack amongst the Sunday newspaper pack at Old Trafford is a chap called Simon Mullock on the Sunday Mirror, who is rarely found wanting when it comes to Mancunian football knowledge and banter, being a born and bred Manc. (Incidentally, he is well-known to Mr Kelly of these pages, who apparently frequently lambasts Mullock online for allegedly being anti-scouse and a Red.

Simon has told me to tell you, Stephen, that he is not actually a United fan but a very bitter City fan, a fact I can confirm.

Anyway, Mullock made a rare mistake on Sunday when he wrote: “Ji-Sung Park will never be the first name that Alex Ferguson pens on his team sheet. He doesn’t even warrant a song or two from the Stretford End”. We beg to differ, as the crowd made plain on Saturday in a typically O.T.T and non-PC way. The hitherto favourite (“Park, Park, wherever you may be/You eat dogs in your home country”) has now been replaced by this ditty: “He shoots, he scores, he’ll eat your Labrador.” Revolting, in both content and ideology perhaps, but that’s football fans for you.

What an oddity that a bit-part player should already have more songs sung about him than such so-called legends such as David Beckham, eh? Park could well become a cult hero one day, and not just for being legendarily useless in a Ralphie Milne kind of way. I’ve always liked him myself, and nominated him in these pages as the best bargain buy of 2005, despite the obvious truth that he generally should not be allowed anywhere near the penalty area, being a danger to passing Ringway air traffic. Yet every broken clock is right twice a day, and the hands were in the sweet spot when Park rose first to a header and stunned the stadium by burying it. Buy that man a tenderised poodle, someone.

I kid. I shouldn’t have to point out that it is a myth that all Koreans eat dogs and I also have every sympathy with the argument that to resort to canine allusions at the first knee jerk instance every time Seoul is mentioned is arguably racist.

But it’s another example of what is undoubtedly unacceptable outside a stadium becoming somehow, however dubiously, passable once inside. Similarly, take the issue of homophobic abuse, about which I am pedantically humourless and opposed to in normal life, having seen too many gay friends suffer the consequences. Yet many a time I have happily joined chants against opposition players whom we have characterised, fairly or not, as likely “batsmen for the other side” and I think this is I have to admit that I find this nothing to be ashamed about.

I raise the issue because this week it has been announced that homophobic abuse in chant form is slated to join racist abuse on the list of arrestible offences inside football grounds. In my humble opinion, it is way too soon for that. Thanks to CCTV technology and computerised ticketing, it is now increasingly easy for clubs to finger alleged perpetrators of any offences and one can imagine The Establishment being keen to add all sorts of other thoughtcrimes to the no-chant list.

It probably won’t be long before ANY abusive behaviour of ANY kind will become indictable and the Premier League will finally get the banalised, hushed theatre audiences at stadia that they have seemed to want all along. “Atmosphere” will instead be piped in over tannoys — it has already been trialled at a couple of grounds.

Fergie may well plead to Ronaldo, as he did this week, that “we get 76,000 people in the stadium for every home game. “You don’t get that anywhere else” (well you do, actually — at his suitors Barca, natch!). But 76,000 browbeaten, BigBrotherised vocal-eunuchs will be no good to anyone. A small nail in the coffin to devote a column to, perhaps: but they will all count at the funeral, I’m afraid.”

*Richard Kurt is author of “The Red Army Years”