When will they ever learn?
By
Mickey Blue Eyes.

STILL being bladdered by ‘flu wasn’t enough. We had to go and lose to the Mancs at home in the Cup. And then there were all those other things……………………………

The match itself wasn’t much and we weren’t in it even then. The truth is it went according to form and not unexpectedly at that. For Evertonians that was probably the thing that got under their skin more than anything else. Their disappointment raised all the usual paranoid bogeymen and scattered more than a few creepy-crawlies from under convenient stones. In such situations there’s never any point asking people to grow up. Next week, if we win, everything will be alright for most people. Those tiny numbers raddled with excess paranoia, conspiracy theories and hate will still be gibbering on internet message forums. You can guarantee they will reappear, neuroses agogo, every time we suffer a reverse. The rest of us will get on with our lives, as we should, and keep footy in its rightful place.

No, I am not advocating an “Aw shucks goshdarnit” approach – as I have said many times before, there’s no point being in a competitive sport unless you compete – but I prefer the company of fans with at least some sense of perspective. I even make due allowance for Mark in the pub after the game. He came in spitting feathers. “COWARDS! Fuckn COWARDS!!” he raged, forehead creased, nose wrinkled, meaning our beloved team’s incapacity in the face of superior individual and team ability. After a few pints he was calm, disappointment ebbing away in the face of reality, that we couldn’t tackle them because we couldn’t get near them and moreover on the day didn’t have the players to do something with the ball even if we managed to get it. It was all very similar to the Chelsea match. Notice any connecting factor? Notice where both opponents are in the league table?

So far, so footy mundane really. Some you win, some you lose, some you draw. You get ecstatic or upset, then you look at the rest of the non-sports news and everything attains focus. That is, if you understand how professional sports work. Sadly, non-footy reasons brought absolutely everything wrong back into sharp focus. What should have been a good or exciting Cup game succeeded only in disinterring the corpses of 70s and 80s thuggery and organised insanity.

Firstly, the neo-nazi lunatics on both sides who put together a physical confrontation are the ones who ought to be identified, charged, tried and sent to jail for as long as the law directs. Everything else stems from that. The police did not cause the violence. Wayne Rooney did not cause the violence. The Everton and Manchester United teams did not cause the violence. The owners of both clubs did not cause the violence. The media did not cause the violence. Innocent fans – the vast and overwhelming majority – did not cause the violence. It was caused by a few hundred bigoted criminals with not a trace of decency in their behaviour that night. There are no mitigating factors whatsoever. I hope the guilty parties are banished from the game forever. Their sort almost destroyed the game a generation ago and if allowed to regenerate their inherited crazy poison will do so again. We all know the truth of this.

Outside of that, it would be sensible for everybody else to look at their own behaviour too.

Like virtually everyone else I was aghast when I heard the proposed kick off time…………early Saturday evening. Given the history of absurd intercity tribalist hatred, I was baffled. Who in their right minds could have proposed such sheer stupidity, and why? Who approved it? Who failed to point out possible consequences? In other words, who failed in their duty of care to society, let alone to innocent fans and the game of football? In this case the police were left to pick up the pieces and then compounded it with some mistakes of their own.

And those fans who appear to think they can preach hatred in one area of the game and then get self-righteous in another had better try to untwist their own motives. If you keep telling everybody how much you hate Bill Kenwright or Paul Gregg or Malcolm Glazer or Keith Wyness why be surprised when some people of equal manifest idiocy tell you how much they hate Wayne Rooney…………………and then act accordingly? All of it smacks, as it always has, of the primitive incestuous mayhem of grubby Italian vendetta and the misery it brings to everyone it touches. Which is the direct opposite of the brilliant and intelligent campaign run by the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association when they helped stop Rupert Murdoch’s monopolist takeover of their club. Oh, IRONY!

The media’s behaviour – particularly BBC TV – in the lead up to the game was even more reprehensible than usual. Hardly any of them, newsprint or broadcast, lost the opportunity to hype the possibility of extreme fans’ reaction to Wayne Rooney’s return. A woman journalist who said she was from BBC News telephoned the owner of this website and implied difficulty in believing he saw no misbehavioour inside or outside the game. How could he when the worst mass incident happened a few kilometres from Goodison Park, in Everton Valley? Those fans who behaved in stereotype therefore played right into such irresponsible and ill-intentioned hands. Once again, too many in the media have tried to have it both ways: help sew and then reap the whirlwind. And it almost goes without saying the more reactionary and oafish once again tried to use it as a stick to beat our city with. Fortunately, Ian Ross moved quickly enough to attenuate the worst elements, though some subsequent opportunist newsprint comments were still little short of disgracefully empty-headed. Which comment also goes for the vacuous muck pepetrated by Linda McDermott on Ian Ross on Radio Merseyside, now suitably dealt with internally.

It would be nice to claim the whole thing was merely a tiresome and odd interlude. But it isn’t. It is symptomatic of a gradual re-emergence of an old, intolerant enemy with an ugly face, much of it prompted by the erosion of novelty in the so-called Premier League. I have seen similar symptoms to a greater or lesser extent at every ground I have visited. Not that the Premier League is to blame for all this: it wouldn’t do to forget its aberrant creation in the first place used 80s violence as one of the excuses for its miserable birth. Nor would it do to ignore world-wide precedents.

With all this as background, the match itself and Wayne Rooney’s “home” coming were all to predictable in the football sense. The better team won, and won easily, as some of us thought they would. If you can’t repeat that sentence and come to terms with it then really you had better give football a rest and give philosophy a try. If you can’t come to terms with the fact that Wayne Rooney simply exercised his personal freedom then maybe you should petition for the return of feudalism. If you are a “Manc” who hates a “Scouser” then maybe you should see a psychiatrist. It would be a welcome change too for the media to get it through their collective, thick head that we don’t need them or their hype, and that they too have responsibilities as well as rights, and in a democratic society they cannot have one without the other. Unless of course they have no interest in the simple decencies of democracy.

Personally speaking, much more of this shite and you can shove professional football down Rupert Murdoch’s toilet. It’s time for everyone to grow up. (23/02/05)

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