The first non-musical fanzine I ever came across was back in early 1979,
when I bought a copy of the literary periodical Stand from a Bohemian hawker in the foyer of the People’s Theatre
in Newcastle, before a production of Brecht’s parable about Nazism, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Stand was founded by the renowned
post-war poet and literary critic Jon Silkin in Hampstead in 1962 and he
continued to edit it following his move to Tyneside in 1965, until his death in
1997, when the magazine ceased publication. As a teenage pseudo intellectual, I
read voraciously and wrote screeds of angst-suffused doggerel, which I sent to
magazines in the hope of publication, but without much success. Silkin was
unfailingly supportive, offering constructive criticism with every rejection
slip. I still have many back issues of Stand
in my attic; dog eared, dusty and well-thumbed. Less acceptably, I also
still hide behind the pretence of being a literary artiste.
Hence I found myself declaiming a slack handful of my dollops of avant garde bilge to a less than
enamoured audience in a South Shields pub at a charity poetry slam on Thursday
14th September. That establishment’s attitude to the participants’
interpretation of the Polyhymnian Muse could be discerned by the fact the pair
of 60 inch televisions at either end of the lounge still showed that evening’s
Europa League games, though the sound had at least been muted. Taking the stage
after Everton’s pitiful thrashing by Atalanta, I ran through my brief set to
scornful indifference and retook my seat to a vague smattering of contemptuous
applause after my closing tribute to Jeffrey Dahmer; Love Song for a Teenage Boy. Time to dip out the lounge and back in
the bar; put my nose in a pint glass and eyes on the screen, not on the
punters, lest I be asked to debate my work ootside
noo in the car park.
Instead of seeing the Arsenal v Cologne game in all its glory, the telly
instead showed pictures of grave faced pundits, opining sombre, shallow notes
of disdain and alarm at the presence of 20,000 plus ticketless and exuberant
away supporters, who were causing absolutely no bother other than existing,
though their presence had caused a delayed kick off. Eventually the game
started; Cologne scored a wonder goal before Arsenal hauled them back and
everything passed off reasonably peaceably with less than half a dozen arrests
and ejections. The game itself won’t live long in the memory, though the impact
of the arrival of such a huge, yet peaceable away following, even if Leeds
would take more to Newport on a Tuesday night for the Checkatrade Trophy, must
stay forever in our collective, footballing consciousness. It felt like
something approaching an epochal event.
Responses to the Cologne throng have been fairly evenly split between
journalistic comments (almost uniformly negative) and social media users
(overwhelmingly in favour); though with more heat than light generated by both
sides of the ideological divide. Your average sports journo, whether print or
broadcast, notionally tabloid or quality, has sought to knit brows and affect
the kind of concerned expression those 1970s television sitcom head masters
used to adopt when chastising irreverent scamps for putting a ball through the
art room window at break time, before resuscitating the fanciful, doomsday
scenario canard about “just what
might have happened.” Apparently these Cologne fans could have been the elite
Praetorian Guard of Daesh and the DPRK military elite, with mid-range
thermonuclear missiles (no doubt stamped Made
in Pyongyang like a stick of intercontinental ballistic seaside rock) secreted about their person. Errant
nonsense like this should not concern us, as all it shows is that regardless of
the lip service paid to the likes of the FSA’s Twenty’s Plenty campaign, the elite owners of the people’s game and
their besuited talking head functionaries regard all away fans as an evil of
questionable necessity. A boat load of foreign followers over here on the
gargle and sitting in the home end, regardless of the jolly intentions of this
Cologne crew and the somnolent nature of Arsenal’s support, except when making
sweary, tearful posts on You Tube,
causes the powers that be to feel concerned, even if that simply shows their
ignorance of Bundesliga culture.
If the authorities came over all repressive, then the response from
fans, individually and severally, was downright bizarre. The bemusing,
accidentally amusing Dadsual social media sub stratum came over all Haight
Astbury following this night of the long queues. After nigh on a decade
pretending to have been wearing designer labels, staring moodily through the
doors of backstreet boozers and throwing plastic garden furniture across
Medieval European piazzas since the early 80s, it seems as if they are prepared
to trade in their chunky Italian knitwear for rough-hewn Latin American ponchos
and their Norman Walsh trabs for open toed sandals. Events on Drayton Park Road
are being seen as the dawning of the new age of football Aquarius.
Why, they demand, should football fans be segregated? Why should we on
the terraces and in the stands have to endure the most repressive, restrictive
set of laws governing any mass sporting gathering under British law? Good
questions and ones that have bothered and infuriated me for decades now. Since
I choose to watch most of my football at Step 5 with my beloved Benfield in
Northern League Division 1, I tend not to have to suffer the indignities
visited upon even home supporters in the Premier League or other levels of the
professional game; banned from drinking alcohol, given no choice whether to sit
or stand, implying their consent to be filmed by authorities for no good reason
other than social control and liable to expulsion from the ground or
prosecution in the courts on the flimsiest of pretexts. Realistically, there is
no other way to describe the situation regarding the legislation surrounding
football in this country than as akin to the working of a police state. And
yet…
And yet, before we begin to demand a scaling back, if not the total
dismantling of all unnecessary and restrictive laws against football fans, is
it not time to check we’ve got our own house in order first? While I fully
accept the veracity of the fact that if we treat ordinary, decent human beings
like children or criminals, they will in time begin to behave accordingly,
there have been instances this season of football fans really letting the side
down. On Saturday 19th August, Leicester City played host to
Brighton in the Seagulls’ first away game in the top flight for 34 years; depressingly
there were a few boneheads in the home end who found it acceptable to indulge
in lame and offensive homophobic chanting. Three of them have been issued with
stadium bans and two of them now have criminal convictions for this; not a huge
number in relation to the total crowd, but bad enough to trigger a
consciousness-raising debate among those fans who don’t, as yet, accept
homophobia, like racism, misogyny, Islamophobia and all other manifestations of
prejudice and discrimination, is both illegal and a disgraceful stain on our
game.
Or what of events at Parkhead two nights before the Arsenal v Cologne
game? In the east end of Glasgow, one
stupid, no doubt plastered, idiotic individual reacted to The Bhoys losing 5-0
to Paris St Germain by running on the pitch and proving he lacked the finesse
of a one-legged man in an arse kicking contest when he attempting to land one
on Kylian Mbappe and missed. UEFA acted swiftly to charge and subsequently fine
Celtic, rightly in this instance, after several previous charges had been
served on the club for the conduct of their famous Green Brigade, who regularly
display political flags and engage in chanting of an avowedly political nature.
Personally, as I believe Celtic fans to be resolutely and uniformly anti-discriminatory
in their attitudes, I find UEFA’s treatment of them to be appalling; to try and
equate the Green Brigade’s conduct with the seething hatred of Linfield for
instance, shows an utter lack of comprehension of how prejudice and
discrimination operates. Suffice to say those claiming that “they’re all as bad
as each other” are often the same sorts who lack understanding why campaigns by
the likes of the admirable Football v
Homophobia aren’t actually “discriminating against straight people,” as
I’ve heard a depressingly large number of times.
If, as fans, we can keep off the pitch, while displaying a level of wit
and emotional intelligence when it comes to what we chant or display on
banners, then perhaps we can think about campaigning for the ending of bubble
matches, changed kick-offs, political policing and heavy handed stewarding.
Then again, I wonder if what goes on at the City Ground in Nottingham is
somehow symbolic of the problems of our society as a whole; the viral grainy
camera phone images of Forest fans rucking with each other in a mano a mano tops off bare knuckle brawl
over who got the last pie at half time leaves me speechless. Equally, the sight
of a Wolves fan being removed from the away end, while subjected to the kind of
heavy handed restraint not seen since Dr Hannibal Lector was given his final
day in court, is simply appalling. However, the on-going debate about who
started this fracas, whether it was an OTT steward or an out of order Wolves
fan, seems to have missed the point about stewarding. Namely, football fans
should not be forced to endure Camp X-Ray style waterboarding for using curse
words.
It would, I suggest, be a fine state of affairs if we could all avoid
the language of the snooker hall and treat each other with respect and
consideration. And that’s before we’ve even discussed the craven idiocy of
songs about Romelu Lukaku’s penis or the sordid conduct of Mark Sampson. But, hey, what do I know? I’m just a beatnik
poet with hippy sensibilities, trying to spread peace and love in the
grassroots game.
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