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English football held its annual “Kick Racism Out Of Football”
week last month. It’s easy to get a bit blasé about
the way racism has, to a large extent, been eradicated from the
game. But it’s not dead yet and we need to be ever vigilant
that it doesn’t rise again. Never forget how it used to be.
The game has changed. It’s a popular mantra that we all trot
out as a shorthand catch-all to cover the bewildering pace at which
events have moved over the last 20 years. We bemoan the influence
of Sky at times, we cavil at the influence of foreign footballers
on our domestic game and particularly the English national team.
The escalating cost of the game and the attendant merchandising
operations do not meet with universal approval.
But nor should we forget the huge strides that the game has made
in some areas in two decades, not least in the way it treats its
supporters. Twenty and thirty years ago, though we didn’t really
fully understand the dangers at the time, you literally took your
life in your hands every time you went to a football match.
The obvious danger came in the occasional pitch battles fought about
by hooligans the length and breadth of the land, football acting
as an excuse for fight loving morons to get together on a regular
basis and beat the living daylights out of one another, and of anyone
else who was unfortunate enough to get in the way of their hobby.
More sinister yet were the grounds we went to, sinister because
we supporters didn’t quite realise the fenced death traps we
were getting ourselves into. In their different, but tragic ways,
Heysel, Bradford and Hillsborough showed us that the dilapidated,
antiquated stadia we frequented were simply not fit for purpose
and that they needed to be modernised and fast.
The Taylor Report that recommended all-seater stadia transformed
the landscape of the national game, perhaps gentrified it a little,
not to everyone’s tastes. But one thing it has done is to remove
some of the bear-baiting vitriol that somehow, unbelievably, we
accepted as the norm back in the 1970s. Hurling vicious, savage
abuse at one another was perfectly acceptable. And it was even more
acceptable - even compulsory - to chuck it at the players. Especially
if they were black.
The best of times, the worst of times. Looking back, they were humiliating
times, times when the national game was disfigured by the National
Front, days when supporters could come to West Bromwich Albion,
spot Laurie Cunningham - a man they should have bowed down to, so
privileged were they to be allowed to watch him parade his talent
- and start to chant, “Pull the trigger, shoot the..”
You get the picture.
Days when Cyrille Regis could be greeted not by the standing ovation
that a man not just of talent but of integrity, honesty, decency
deserved, but by a shower of bananas. When Brendon Batson, a graceful
full-back and ultimately a hugely influential administrator, did
not draw cheers but a succession of grunts. Because it was funny
to make monkey noises at black players, satirical comment worthy
of giants such as Peter Cook or Oscar Wilde, though of course they
were never witty enough for that. Or maybe it was just that those
noises were the only ones those Neanderthals had learnt how to make.
They were, on reflection, grotesquely barbaric times inside our
football grounds, times when great footballers were singled out
for attack for the colour of their skin, as well as the magnitude
of their talent. Opposition fans - players too - were not above
handing out racist garbage in an effort to put magicians like Cunningham
off their game. The greatness of these players wasn’t simply
that they performed so superbly. It was that they did so under the
most horrific provocation.
Cyrille Regis admits, “We were breaking new ground. Once you’re
in, you’re not thinking about making a stand for blackness,
you want to stretch your talent as far as it will go. The colour
situation added another dimension because the press picked up on
it, young black boys picked up on it, and you are made aware of
your position, but it’s not your focal point.
You want to perform and on the back of that, then there’s this
other stuff, being a role model, destroying myths.
“It was difficult, back then we’d have 5 and 6,000 people
chanting racist abuse, where now that kind of thing on that scale
has gone. What you do learn is to change negatives into positives,
“you give me stick, ok, I’ll show you how to play.”
You don’t react, you don’t go into the crowd, you don’t
gesture back, you get hold of the ball and stick in the net, go
home with the points. That’s the way to hurt the opposition.
“But from a black perspective, West Brom did wonders for the
black community. It was radical, really radical. The real explosion
started here without a doubt. A lot of the players that came later,
players like Ian Wright, say that we inspired them, and we helped
them believe they could do it. I went to Trinidad, met some friends,
and his father was full of the Three Degrees stuff. It was a radical
thing, three black guys, playing well, great team, top of the league.
Once we’d done it, there was never any excuse not to use black
players again. And Laurie and myself were strikers, getting goals,
so that makes it even more exciting, so that probably helped.
“Personally, we learned that football is as much a mental game,
you turn things round, you use your ability to fight it. If all
that racism was on the streets, affecting my kids or my wife, bricks
through the window, it would have been a totally different ball
game. If the racists had targeted my family away from the game,
that would have been something else. But it was confined to the
arena and I could handle it. You can do something about it then.
You go out on the field and perform, get your goals, pocket the
points, I’ll show you how good I am, thanks very much. That’s
how you hurt them most.”
Brendon Batson was on the receiving end of attacks too, not least
when he was at Cambridge United. “I remember coming away from
one game, I was sitting on the coach by the window, and a supporter
from the opposition spotted me. He came racing over to the coach,
started shouting and screaming at me, then just spat in my face
- maybe he couldn’t work out there was a coach window between
us. There were incidents of that kind on a regular basis.”
When Batson arrived at The Hawthorns to team up with Cunningham
and Regis, it was to become part of the famous Three Degrees. It’s
not to big a claim to say that between hem, they changed the course
of English footballing history, indicating that black footballers
could do any job you asked of them - preposterously, that had been
open to doubt before that. They didn’t like the cold, or being
tackled you see.
“That whole “three degrees” stuff, as young footballers,
you don’t know how to handle it,” remembers Cyrille.
“Do you speak out against racism, or do you let your football
talk for you? There’s two parts to it, when they’re trying
to put you off your game, which is just laughable, but there was
the more serious side because there was a lot of skinhead, NF stuff
around at the time as well and that was very nasty. You’d get
10,000 people singing racist songs at you and I don’t think
anyone knew what to do. Imagine that now!
“Things have been done thankfully and it doesn’t happen
like that. But back then, you’d have thousands of people screaming
“Lick my boots” at you. And the authorities just said
“disgraceful” and did nothing. Nothing happened for years,
until the late 1980s with the “Kick Racism” campaigns.
Then laws got passed against racist chanting, but even then you
don’t hear about people getting kicked out of the ground for
doing it do you, even now? The campaigns have done great things,
but there’s always more to do.”
That there is, and it’s not simply in terms of black football
any more. If Zoltan Gera weren’t wearing Albion’s number
11, but was instead working as a labourer on a building site in
Tipton, would we look so kindly upon another Hungarian working in
this country? Nobody has any issues with Nathan Ellington’s
Muslim faith while he’s playing football, but what if he’d
been a shopkeeper?
The great strength football has is the way in which it binds communities.
The black football experience of the 1970s was such that it battered
down prejudices, it made people who spouted spurious white supremacist
theories look utterly stupid - name me a white footballer who was
superior to Laurie Cunningham?
Football must now do the same with other ethnic groups that are
subject to discrimination and abuse, the latest being the migrant
workers of eastern Europe, countrymen of players such as Koren,
Kuszczak and Gera. Hopefully, watching these men ply their trade
on the football field will see their compatriots receive greater
respect, just as Regis, Anderson, Berry and Blissett helped integrate
black and white society faster than any laws or directives ever
could.
The game has moved light years forward in three decades, but the
danger always lurks. The memory of watching Laurie Cunningham play
against a backdrop of savagery still makes me cringe.
Never again. Never let it happen again. To anyone, any colour, any
creed.
Never again.
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