Racism & homophobia alive and kicking – at Tottenham

From top to bottom, Tottenham Hotspur has never been a football club with much class, and after reading about the vile abuse directed at ex-Tottenham and Arsenal defender Sol Campbell whilst playing for Portsmouth on Sunday, that opinion can only been strengthened.

As an Arsenal supporter that has been to hundreds upon hundreds of matches over the years, I can honestly say that apart from the odd ignoramus in the crowd, violence and racist/homophobic chanting on mass is pretty much a non-existant or at most long-forgotten relic these days. As society has become more tolerant, so have the Arsenal supporters, further led by the long-standing sophistication, traditions and respect embedded in their psyche by the club’s hierarchy.

Personally, I always found the anti-Tottenham chants relating to their large section of Jewish supporters distinctly embarrassing – even as a 13-year-old. Maybe I was brought up better or just mature, but around a decade ago I also noticed a commitment from my fellow supporters to no longer tolerate such fascist chanting.

On one such occasion, I remember attending one of the big screen games at Highbury on a Saturday morning, relaying the Tottenham vs Arsenal clash several miles away in North London. Behind me were a couple of oafish early-twenty-something Arsenal supporters, both singing in unison about gassing the Tottenham jews. As always, I cringed in the knowledge that they happened to support the same football team as me, never mind the juvenile ignorance of it all. To me they were little more than a pair of knuckle-dragging cavemen. Several years before that no doubt a few hundred of the Arsenal North Bank stand would heartily join in with the chanting – although those mantras in particular were always confined to a very small section of the crowd. On this day, however, my discomfort was lifted by the many Arsenal supporters located around me turning round and actually telling this moronic duo to either shut up or leave. Within 5 minutes, two policeman arrived on the scene, and politely reaffirmed the crowd’s general consensus. It was genuinely good to see supporters grassing up their own; conformation that whatever your allegiance, this sort of behaviour should never be tolerated.

What then of Tottenham Hotspur supporters' persistent and savage chanting against Sol Campbell on Sunday? And in such huge numbers! I am not privy to the exact chants, but they may well have been the very same as were chanted at White Hart Lane several years ago when Campbell last paid his old team a visit, running along the lines of.

"Sol, Sol, wherever you may be/You're on the verge of lunacy/And we don't give a f*ck if you're hanging from a tree/You Judas c*nt with HIV."

"He's big/He's black/He takes it up the crack/Sol Campbell, Sol Campbell."

Although I wasn't wholly comfortable with an ex-Spurs player coming to Arsenal, I recognised that Sol Campbell had actually done a very good job at Tottenham, helping to make the club moderately successful without actually winning anything of note. Likewise George Graham did a fantastic job at Arsenal before becoming manager of Tottenham Hotspur, although I don’t remember Arsenal supporters murmuring a word of abuse in George’s direction. We appreciated everything he had done for the club whilst he was a Highbury servant; we respected him, and accepted the choice he had made as a free-thinking individual.

Tottenham fans, however, just can’t let it go, despite the fact that Campbell’s departure to Arsenal was SEVEN years ago, and therefore wholly irrelevant now – particularly as he’s been playing for Portsmouth for almost half of that duration. So why on earth after all this time can so many Tottenham supporters still be enraged at Sol Campbell? Well, the fact is, they’re not enraged at Sol Campbell, they’re simply venting their ugly frustrations following yet another year of on and off-the-field failure, then directing it at the very easiest of targets. A target that has shown immense character and class by refusing to comment on the abuse directed at him for all of this time.

On a serious note, however, one has to ask, where is the FA in all this? Aren’t they supposed to support and protect their own players? Shouldn’t this utterly impotent organisation be writing to Tottenham Hotspur Football Club and telling them to put their house in order and eject huge sections of the crowd who make such revolting and vociferous statements – that if were uttered in the street in the vicinity of a policeman would no doubt find them arrested?

Worst of all, is the fact that there are young children sitting in the crowd who should surely be protected from having to listen to these degrading insults; where on earth is the responsibility of the adults who are shouting this drivel in earshot of not only their own children - beggars belief - but other supporter's children? And where is the responsibility of other children's parents, should they not subsequently complain to the club or the police? And most of all, where is the responsibility of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club's seemingly toothless board, who to my knowledge have never even entertained the idea of coming out and admonishing their own supporters for such chanting, let alone threatened to remove their season tickets.

It’s hard to believe a club could sink much further than their placing in the Premier League, but it appears they have, and it leads to the conclusion that this is a small club, with no ethics, no class, and whose own supporters have no values.

Of course I am not naive enough to suppose that Arsenal or any other club has a clean bill of health, but it's just a pity that we should again be reminded so starkly that football has a long way to go before banishing its most ill-educated of misfits, and that football's club Chairman and authorities do not even bother to speak up against it, let alone take some much-required action, is quite despicable.

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