{"id":59654,"date":"2014-08-14T10:44:09","date_gmt":"2014-08-14T09:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/?p=59654"},"modified":"2017-03-27T10:49:18","modified_gmt":"2017-03-27T09:49:18","slug":"padraig-reidy-footballer-banter-will-always-need-edge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/?p=59654","title":{"rendered":"Padraig Reidy: Football banter will always need its edge"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"(Photo:

(Photo: Following Millwall FC<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n

Top flight football is back! Back! BACK! After an agonising entire month since the World Cup Final with nothing to sustain people but the made-up soccer tournaments designed to draw American crowds, and the Commonwealth Games, and the England India cricket tests, the people of Britain can relax, and fall trustingly into the loving arms of the Premiership.<\/p>\n

Once more, it will be deemed legitimate to spend Saturday afternoons in a pub, watching other men watching football; once more we can spend Saturday nights complaining about Mark Lawrenson and Alan Shearer\u2019s dull observations on Match of the Day; once more Arsenal will be a little disappointing.<\/p>\n

I say \u201conce more\u201d but of course the football never really ends, it just sleeps for a few weeks every year. But now it is awake.<\/p>\n

At this point, fans of leagues that are not the premiership will be pointing out that their leagues started last weekend, and they\u2019re right.<\/p>\n

And what was the main story from the (non-Premiership) Football League this week? The news that Millwall fans had upset their Leeds United rivals with a new chants about serial sexual abuser Jimmy Savile, a Leeds native. Not to exactly repeat it, but the chant essentially suggested that Leeds fans may be the offspring of Savile.<\/p>\n

Milwall\u2019s manager Ian Holloway criticised his own fans, saying: \u201cLet\u2019s stop and think about what [Savile] has actually done. That\u2019s the most important thing and we don\u2019t see that. \u2018Oh, it is a bit of banter\u2019. It isn\u2019t funny, is it? I don\u2019t think so.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now clearly, some Millwall fans did find this funny. Or they found the idea of offending Leeds fans funny. Because offending the opposition has for a long time, been part of going to football.<\/p>\n

My home team, Cork City, who play in Ireland\u2019s Airtricity League, have a pretty good relationship with Derry City. Derry, despite being based in Northern Ireland, play in the Republic\u2019s league. Their fans are mostly nationalist rather than Unionist, and they are a widely respected group , admired for travelling long distances in large numbers to support their team, and making a lot of noise when they get there.<\/p>\n

In spite of all this admiration, Cork fans greet Derry fans, who have literally travelled the length of the country, with the chant \u201cWhat\u2019s it like to have a Queen?\u201d a dig at the fact that Derry fans live in the United Kingdom whether they like it or not.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly calculated to offend, but that is the point of that much-vilified concept, \u201cbanter\u201d. It\u2019s part of the contest, complementing the action on the pitch (sometimes bettering it during dull games).<\/p>\n

Football banter (or, in modern usage, \u201cbants\u201d or even \u201c#bantz\u201d), can range from the strange to the self-deprecating to the plain awful. When tiny Barnsley FC had a brief glimpse of top-division glory in the 96-97 season, they would sing \u201cBarnsley – it\u2019s just like watching Brazil\u201d (it wasn\u2019t). Fans of lower league Gillingham became famous in the late 90s for a slightly lewd song involving celery, that had absolutely nothing to do with football or Gillingham.<\/p>\n

Chelsea fans, or anyone who\u2019s ever been on a District Line underground train on the day of a Chelsea home game, will know the interminable tale of the man (men) who went to mow a meadow.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the more innocent end of things.<\/p>\n

Inevitably, things do not stay so innocent.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s references to incidents\u2019 in rival clubs\u2019 histories (\u201cwho\u2019s that lying on the runway…\u201d referring to the 1958 Munich Air Disaster that killed several Manchester United players), there\u2019s the digs at perceived poverty (\u201cIn your Liverpool slums\u201d or, as used happen in the 1980s, fans from southern English teams chanting \u201cUnemployed, unemployed, unemployed\u201d at Northerners. There\u2019s the historical rivalries (Rangers fans singing \u201cThe Famine\u2019s Over, Why Don\u2019t You Go Home\u201d at Celtic\u2019s Irish-identifying supporters).<\/p>\n

Personal abuse towards players, particularly those regarded as turncoats, can turn vicious: racist, homophobic, and ableist in nature. Rangers goalkeeper Andy Goram, having admitted to mental illness, was subjected to the chant \u201cThere\u2019s only two Andy Gorams\u201d. One chant<\/a> directed at England defender Sol Campbell, who moved from Tottenham Hotspur to north London rivals Arsenal, managed to pack pretty much every modern taboo into three lines.<\/p>\n

In the countries of Europe, South America and Africa where it is the majority participation sport, its supporters are not especially worried about upholding the image of the game. Supporters of minority sports will be aware of the constant feeling that one has to talk up your pastime not just as more entertaining, but more edifying than other sports in order to justify your devotion. Hence constant appeals to the spirit of cricket, and the inherent sportsmanship of rugby union (at least when players aren\u2019t gouging each others eyes out).<\/p>\n

Football doesn\u2019t have this problem. It doesn\u2019t have to convince anyone of anything. It has the most fans, therefore it is the best sport. Even in countries such as Ireland where actual match attendances are low, the omnipresence of English (and increasingly Spanish) football means fans don\u2019t feel obliged to impress anyone. With that assurance comes a certain cockiness: to adapt the popular chant: \u201cWe are football, we\u2019ll do what we want\u201d. Or perhaps \u201c[Everyone] likes us, [so] we don\u2019t [have to] care\u201d.<\/p>\n

The game is played to different rules in the soccer stands.<\/p>\n

The question is what, if anything, should be done about this. The Scottish government\u2019s attempt to silence sectarian singing at Rangers vs Celtic \u201cOld Firm\u201d games, the Sectarianism At Football Act, ended up in the ludicrous situation of a Partick Thistle fan being arrested for singing a song lampooning the Catholic vs Protestant posturing of the two big Glasgow clubs (\u201cFuck your Pope and Fuck Your Queen\u201d). The law has been derided as \u201cmince\u201d<\/a> by one senior sheriff, and the opposition Labour party has vowed to scrap it should they win the next Scottish election.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, south of the border, attempts to stop footballer supporters using the word \u201cYid\u201d ran into trouble due to the fact that fans of Tottenham – a club with strong Jewish self-identification – quite liked using the word, having re-appropriated the term. It did not help that the campaign was led by writer David Baddiel, himself Jewish, but more importantly in that argument, a Chelsea fan.<\/p>\n

Must anything be done at all? I think (and I speak only for myself) that it is reasonable for footballers to be able to go about their working life – i.e. the 90 minutes on the pitch, without being subjected to racial or homophobic abuse, certainly not from players and not from fans either.<\/p>\n

But this is only a call to, at most, uphold the law as it stands. Football clubs are private entities that can make their own rules, but they should be wary of cracking down on the songs, the slights, and yes, the top, classic, legendary banter that make football what it is.<\/p>\n

As for the idea of specific football laws, as in Scotland? As the song goes: No, nay, never.<\/p>\n

This article was posted on August 14, 2014 at indexoncensorship.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Football banter (or, in modern usage, \u201cbants\u201d or even \u201c#bantz\u201d), can range from the strange to the self-deprecating to the plain awful, but it will always need its edge. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[581,21],"tags":[6637,2160,986,737,590,4829],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59654"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59654"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87364,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59654\/revisions\/87364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/newsite02may\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}