by Mike Martin @thefootietweet
I belong to that group
of rather anoraky individuals whose life ambitions include joining ‘The 92
Club’; that is, having attended a football match at all 92 league grounds in
England (and, before any Swansea or Cardiff fans start writing letters, Wales.)
I can’t complain about
a lack of encouragement. Just this
minute, for reasons not made entirely clear, I’ve received a text message from
Oxford Utd, of all clubs, informing me that tickets remain available – as if there were any
doubt in the matter – for Saturday’s League Two match with Accrington Stanley.
I am, though, entirely
glad that I’ve already done Elland Road.
Given the character of their ludicrous owner-chairman Ken Bates, I doubt
I’ll be welcomed if any of them get wind of this article. Still, if being banned from Leeds Utd
A.F.C. is good enough for the Guardian…
Leeds played
Manchester Utd in the Football League Cup on Tuesday night; that is to say,
they turned up in the correct kit and ran around the pitch for ninety minutes;
it did not appear much of a contest.
The most dispiriting thing about the fixture was not the ease of
Manchester Utd’s 3-0 victory, nor was it even the distasteful chants inside and
outside the ground from fans of both teams. It was the fact that hearing neither Leeds fans singing in
gleeful tones of the Munich air disaster, nor Manchester Utd supporters retort
with reference to the murders of two Leeds fans in Istanbul in 2000, were
remotely unexpected.
For those with short
memories: on 6th February 1958, Manchester Utd’s team plane crashed on its
third attempted take-off from a slush-covered runway at the Munich-Reim
Airport, causing 23 eventual fatalities, including eight players. On 5th April 2000, on the eve of a UEFA
Cup semi-final first leg away to Galatasaray, two Leeds fans, Kevin Speight and
Christopher Loftus, were slain with machetes by hooligans in an unprovoked
attack. Four men were convicted in
involvement in the killings but remained free more than a decade after pursuing
an interminable appeal, though they are now back in jail.
In other words, both sets of supporters should know better. Yet the large clubs in the north of
England remain beset with a parochial tribalism not unmixed with plain
psychopathy. Here we must permit
an inconvenient truth to escape the page: I don’t much care for a lot of
football fans. There must be more
to the game that blindly following one club to the exclusion of a more general
awareness of the game, or even of the basic values of human decency.
After Tuesday’s match, Twitter, which at times resembles a confederacy
of dunces, was polluted with twerps from both sets of supporters arguing that
‘they started it’, as if it made a kernel of difference. Anybody singing about Hillsborough,
Heysel, Munich or Istanbul deserves never to set foot in a football ground
again. Sadly, they are not the
only teams will have fans who are an embarrassment to the club.
The game has succeeded in greatly reducing the physical threat to
peaceful fans attending matches, even the biggest rivalries. My visit to Elland Road was for a match
against Chelsea in September 2003 and, thanks to efficient policing, felt under
no personal threat at any time.
With security better than ever, maybe obscene chants are what we have
instead.
Yet large crowds inevitably bring about false bravado. Here’s a challenge to any member of the
Manchester Utd ‘firm’ who joins in the chants about Istanbul or Hillsborough:
come to the housing estate where my father grew up in Huyton, Merseyside, and
repeat just one line of your Hillsborough ditty in the open street. I strongly recommend McGoldrick Park,
or perhaps the Blue Bell Lane area after nightfall. Good luck with that one.
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