The Monday Miscellany

It’s only taken me twenty-five years to realize it but I’ve finally worked out what the problem with football is.  The fans.

Now, before Footballing World has its Jan Moir moment, I don’t mean proper supporters.  Those who drove the length of the country yesterday to watch their beloved Charlton Athletic get outplayed by a team lying 16th the sixth tier of English football might be barmy but their lunacy makes English club football the joy that it is.

Controversies have abounded so far in a season barely a third of the way through its existence and too many of them involve people whose job is to sit and .  I refer not to the twit who threw the beach ball onto the Stadium of Light pitch, costing his Liverpool team a goal and the match.  His folly brought its own punishment.

Rather, the fans of Hamburg, Celtic, Manchester Utd, West Ham Utd and Millwall who have brought football fans into disrepute so far this season.  The last three clubs have been victims of what you might call Carling Cup syndrome.  This is when lower ticket prices and higher availability of tickets allow some of the less desirable characters among a club’s support base to roll back the years.

It is hard to imagine that the delinquents who laid waste to Oakwell are frequent attendees at Old Trafford.  For a start, they would not be able to afford a season ticket.  Once in the ground, Manchester Utd stewards would not tolerate their behaviour.  Two days before the Barnsley trip, Manchester Utd were playing at Anfield, home of their most bitter rivals, yet the fans who went to Merseyside behaved themselves.  They couldn’t afford not to.

Manchester Utd fans cannot possibly have a grudge against Barnsley, a team they have not played competitively since 1998.  But the supporters at Oakwell were a different bunch to those at Anfield.  They were the sort who would have season tickets in the 1980s, when behaviour at grounds was often appalling.  The popularity, and consequently the price, of football increased hugely in the nineties, pricing many undesirables out of the game.  We may be sure the Premier League did not achieve that by accident.

There was little point in Old Trafford staff keeping City fans in the stadium after the final whistle after the recent derby.  It is not United fans who attend matches who are the problem.  Those who would attack City fans in the Salford Quays area are largely those who can no longer attend Premier League matches.

West Ham and Millwall can always be trouble, particularly in an age when books written by cretinous hooligans in semi retirement fill the bookstores and dire films in which Danny Dyer pretends to be ‘one of the firm’ abound.  But recent league meetings were far less explosive than their Carling Cup tie this season.  Back came the old-guard for one last hurrah, and so what if innocent people get caught up in the violence?  That’s what real football’s all about.

I sat behind somebody at Elland Road in 2003 who was directing a volley of abuse at some player in the opposition (Swindon Town, I ask you) during – you guessed it – a Carling Cup tie.  The woman next to him, in a refreshing break from the acquiescence which blights to many grounds, told him to behave himself.  The man responded, “It’s not the f**king opera, love”.  He then burst into a verse of “Shit and you know you are” to the tune of La Donna è Mobile from Verdi’s Rigoletto.

Because Carling Cup ties are only occasional events, hooligans’ misbehaviour is more focused into one-off occasions.  It is not spread thinly over a whole season.  But let’s not fall into the trap of making it a class issue.  Edgeley Park, home of my Stockport County, has never struck me as a meeting post for the bohemian bourgeoisie of Cheshire.  Yet we, on the whole, behave ourselves.

Should you ever be tempted to believe it is nearly the second decade of the 21st century, give some attention to Celtic or Rangers.  Celtic may bang on about how zillions of them all went to Seville for the 2003 UEFA Cup Final and came home with nothing but a suntan but they can always be relied upon to abuse the Remembrance Sunday minute’s silence, as did some in the away end at Stamford Bridge yesterday  (Though, in Manchester Utd’s case, it was not for sectarian reasons.  They were merely being idiots.)

There can be no excuse, though, for Hamburg fans provoking Celtic’s travelling support by showing a Union flag before Thursday’s Europa League encounter.  Nor for the huge, choreographed NO SURRENDER! display which filled one end.  They are lucky that Celtic’s travelling fans tend to come from the more amiable end of their support spectrum and they were not required to live up to their bravado.

Then there’s the behaviour of Rangers fans in Manchester last year, the old F**k The Pope chant, the treatment of Neil Lennon and myriad other acts which offend decency.  20th century Irish politics simply will not do what 99% of British football followers want it to and sod off back across both the Irish sea and the turn of the millennium.  To think they want to join the Premier League.

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Those of you with watches which need resetting will be relieved to hear that the ol’ Club v Country Debate™ is back, this time involving your favourite Portuguese media magnet Cristiano Ronaldo, who has managed to knack his ankle with sufficient gusto that he has missed Real Madrid’s last seven matches.

Real Madrid believe he will be out for another fortnight.  Carlos Queiroz – whom, it’s fair to say, feels he owes Real no favours after his short spell there in 2003/04 – thinks differently and has picked Ronaldo in the Portugal squad for Saturday’s World Cup Play-Off against Bosnia-Herzegovina.  Such is the form of his alternatives: Nani, Ricardo Quaresma and Simão, he feels he has no choice.

And so we have a tug of war between Real Madrid, who insist Ronaldo is not fit to play, and Queiroz, who says Ronaldo will have a rôle against Bosnia, “…even if it’s only for a few minutes.”  You almost feel sorry for the player.  It’s official, then: Portugal are so ordinary they need a half-fit celebrity right-sided midfielder to drag them to the… oh, hang on…

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Even Portugal, though, are not quite so desperate as Liverpool, who as I write have depended on a truly astonishing dive from David N’Gog to draw level in a home match against Birmingham City.  Whilst it is true that sometimes an attacker must hurdle a tackle to avoid injury, this was clearly not one of those occasions.  So ridiculous was N’Gog’s dying swan act it is a wonder that Peter Walton didn’t see through it there and then.

Compare N’Gog with Didier Drogba, yesterday booked for being kicked very hard in the chest by Johnny Evans, who was lucky to stay on the pitch.  But it is now commonplace for Drogba to be fouled and then accused of diving, which is as wretched a form of cheating as diving itself.