A city above suspicion
Liverpool play Millwall and the Scousers riot. The FA fines Millwall. Funny old world, says Rod Liddle The case of Sam Brown is, I grant you, hard to beat — but I think Millwall Football Club have beaten it, just about. Sam is the Oxford undergraduate who was recently fined £80 for verbal homophobic abuse of a police horse. He suggested that the police horse was ‘gay’ — a remark which, Thames Valley Police pronounced, caused offence to the officer riding the horse and to the horse itself. When I read that story, in the Daily Telegraph, I mused to myself that you’d have to go a very long way to find a more fatuous and boneheaded charge, or an institution more dunderheaded and vindictive in its pursuit of politically correct brownie points than the Thames Valley Police. But actually, I didn’t have to go very far at all. It was right there, on my doorstep.
This is a story from the world of football and so the usual parameters, the stuff we associate with the real world, don’t remotely apply. But even dressed up with that caveat, what the Football Association has done to Millwall is pretty staggering — and in the relentless competition between self-important, unelected institutions to win themselves badges of political merit, I think the FA gets the nod over the coppers from Reading.
What happened was this. Last October Millwall played a football match against Liverpool. It is the only football match I’ve attended where one set of fans sung, with great fervour, ‘There’s only one Boris Johnson.’ That was a chorus offered up by the Millwall fans — and believe me, I blushed with pride that evening. Maybe, I thought, we’ll also get, ‘Six feet two, eyes of blue, Charlie Moore is after you’, or better still, ‘He’s here, he’s there, he’s every f***** where, Marky Steyn, Marky Steyn’. But they confined their Spectator-based eulogies to Boris, sadly. And they sang about Boris to annoy the Liverpool fans, whom we at The Spectator had recently, inadvertently, offended. And that’s what football fans do: for 90 minutes they’re what we might term omniphobic. When football fans sing, ‘Your mum’s on the game and your dad’s in the nick/ You can’t get a job ’cos you’re too f***** thick, in your Liverpool slums... ’, it is a case of reaching for whatever is to hand to spite and humiliate your opponents — in this particular case a popularly perceived sociological vignette of Liverpool which is, I’m certain, entirely misplaced. Some Liverpool fans alleged that Millwall taunted their opponents with songs about the Hillsborough tragedy in 1989, where 96 Liverpool fans lost their lives. I didn’t hear any, but it wouldn’t surprise me too much if a small minority had done so. I heard a few Liverpool fans singing about Ferencvaros, though, where a few weeks earlier Millwall fans had been stabbed — and I have heard them singing songs to Manchester United supporters about the Munich air crash, too. That’s what they’re like, football supporters. Not very nice.
But this stuff is all contention, anyway. What follows is fact. The Liverpool fans staged a riot, ripped out 68 seats, showered the home fans with coins and, in the mêlée, injured one of their own, disabled fans. The police restored order and three Liverpool fans were sent to prison as a result. And then the FA ordered an inquiry.
When they ended their inquiry they concluded this: Liverpool should be exonerated, but Millwall should face a £25,000 fine for racist chanting. Now, they didn’t mean being spiteful to Merseysiders or singing about how good Boris is — they meant proper, racist abuse of one of Liverpool’s players, a chap called Djimi Traore.
Nobody, on the night, heard this racist abuse. The player didn’t. The chairman of Liverpool didn’t. The police didn’t. The stewards heard nothing and nor did the referee they all testified to this. Nor did the Liverpool fans make a complaint on the night. Only after the FA had called an inquiry (and Liverpool risked punishment) did that happen, via a handful of emails, some of which were from people who hadn’t been to the game. The FA listened to audio footage of the game and thought, in a 17-second clip, they could hear somebody at the Millwall end ‘non sequentially booing’. Have you ever booed out of sequence? If you have, watch yourself.
And so, at a game where a riot took place, a man was injured, huge damage was done and three people were locked up by the police, the FA took a decision to fine the other side for something which, on the night, nobody, anywhere, heard — not even the player at whom it was allegedly directed.
My suspicion is that some time-serving imbecile in the FA wished to make a political point and saw Millwall — a small club, unfashionable and not especially popular as an ideal target. Far better to clobber Millwall than have a go at famous Liverpool — which the FA, through its Liverpool-supporting chairman Brian Barwick, has been fighting to get reinstated in next year’s European Champions League, in direct contravention of Uefa rules. (There’s another irony here: it was Liverpool fans who succeeded in getting all English clubs banned from Europe when they killed 39 Juventus fans at the Heysel stadium in 1985. Times change, but the boisterous nature of Liverpool fans seems to have remained intact, doesn’t it?) Fortunately, the sheer rank injustice and idiocy of the FA decision has appalled not only fans of Millwall but most other clubs in the Football League. There is now a petition condemning the FA, signed by supporters of everyone from Tranmere to Torquay, and an early day motion has been put before the House of Commons expressing similar sentiments. For once, the little people are not prepared simply to roll over and accept the jurisdiction of an ossified, undemocratic and selfserving institution — which, incidentally, Lord Burns has recently suggested should be reformed root and branch.
Not that the FA is likely to take very much notice. Who knows, it may even have the effrontery to fine Millwall for being so bold as to complain about the sentence. The fight to get Liverpool back in the Champions League, meanwhile, has of course been won by the FA.
What we need now, I think, is a petition and early day motion to clear the name of poor Sam Brown. The more I think about Mr Brown’s case, the more it seems to me that it was the police who acted in a politically incorrect manner. Why on earth should the horse have been offended at being called gay? Even more so, why should the officer have been offended by the suggestion that he was riding a homosexual horse? Surely he should have been proud? Gay, as we know, is not a pejorative term. It might even be a statement of glorious affirmation.
You can read more about the Millwall petition at: www.petitiononline.com/ MFC1885/petition.html.
Previous page
