Things had been going so well. A month of football festivity that began with Andrea Bocelli at the Stadio Olimpico performing Nessun Dorma, the anthem of that glorious summer of 1990 when football was a regal festival that brought the nation together (up until the point when it went pear-shaped on penalties, of course). England’s progress through Euro 2020 has been a thing of joy, too, not just because they kept winning (and winning well), but because we had, or so we thought, an England team to got behind as a nation. An England team that was about youthful exuberance, a wealth of squad-deep talent, a manager whose past pain was felt by everyone, but whose enduring humility and all-round niceness carried through a vision for his side.
Even the moronic booing when England players - black and white - took the knee in their opening Group D game against Croatia, eventually gave way to cheers from fans more genuinely inclined to get behind their players, as the privilege of having a ticket to a Wembley international should require. But, clearly, we’d been lulled into a false sense of security. For all our pride at football coming home to where it began, we’ve had a painful reminder of the neanderthal tendencies that lurk not far from the surface.
Without dismissing it, the drunken yobbishness at Wembley (and in Leicester Square) was tragically inevitable. An 8pm kickoff, you say, for the biggest game in 55 years? Great! When do we start drinking? What has emerged as more disturbing is the motivation amongst those who violently tailgated their way into Wembley Stadium on Sunday evening in truly disgraceful scenes that would have ruined many genuine fans’ experience before a ball had even been kicked. Sadly, though, worse was to come in the wake of the final kick.
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| Picture: Twitter/England |
The racist abuse directed at teenager Bakayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho after their penalties missed should shock everyone, but sadly, they come as no surprise. That booing at Wembley, a month ago today, was a warning that for all our belief that football has become a more inclusive place, after the horrors of the 1970s and 1980s, this country’s culture wars have given rise to it once more.
Some time ago I likened the febrile mood in Britain to that of New York in Ghostbusters. I didn’t make the comparison to be flippant, but to analogously illustrate how the emergence of cultural division and nastiness was like the film’s fissures and cracks in Manhattan sidewalks revealing the pink slime bubbling up from the underworld. Since the European referendum, there seems to have been a legitimisation of hate on grounds other than just binary politics. The murder of Jo Cox was a sign, as was the desecration of a Polish cultural centre in West London not soon after the vote. The faceless keyboard warriors who posted disgusting abuse on the England players’ social media accounts (not to mention the astonishing volume of people who ‘liked’ those comments), can be directly traced to the UK’s culture war, legitimised by politicians who’ve facilitated and even encouraged the ongoing assault on wokeism, and given licence to the right-wing media and the gobshite rent-a-quote controversialists that provide them with clickbait.
Patel - who’ll I’ll readily describe as being thick as mince - gave her tacit approval of the knee taking at Wembley being booed by branding it as “gesture politics”, tapping into the frequent message of the right associating the practice by footballers with the alleged Marxist beliefs of America’s core Black Lives Matter movement. Asked by GB News if she would criticise booing fans, she said: “That's a choice for them, quite frankly”. The Aston Villa player - who has previously met Patel to discuss issues of racism - had enough last night, tweeting: “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as 'Gesture Politics’ and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we're campaigning against, happens.". He is, Mason correctly described, “boiling with anger”. He’s not alone: Anton Ferdinand - caught up in that ugly racism episode involving my own club’s John Terry a few years ago - added to the debate on the BBC, citing his own experience of the racist abuse he’s had to endure in his football career, calling on the government to something about the social media platforms facilitating the abuse.
Whether you take the flimsy view that those responsible were just drunken idiots mouthing off, or you see it as the thin edge of a nefarious wedge that seeks to dehumanise minorities, and history has taught us where that leads, it all boils down to the same thing: that any form of abuse, directed at any minority or, for that matter, majority, is symptomatic of a lack of respect for fellow humans. I understand how some people believe that political correctness goes too far, and that wokeism or cancel culture can be irritating, but I’ve never understood how just being kind should come to being wrong. That lies at the heart of online abuse, that social media has enabled commentary that invariably wouldn’t be made to someone’s face. Not to labour the point, but abusing someone for not scoring in a penalty shootout is nothing short of cowardice in the face of bravery.
Inevitably, the online comments on Sunday night have reignited the debate over social media platforms being unable to police themselves, and that legislation - such as the UK government’s proposed Online Safety Bill forcing Twitter, Facebook and all the rest to make social media a safer place for everyone. The counter to this is that it would effectively be a form of censorship. At the time of writing, a petition calling for greater governance of social media in the wake of the England players’ treatment had reached 500,000 signatures. I can only expect that number to get bigger.
The trouble is that even with Boris Johnson yesterday calling on the footballers’ abusers to “crawl back under the rock from which you emerged”, his own lack of condemnation for those booing England players at Wembley will count amongst the abusers themselves. Patel’s comments, compounded by the tweet that launched Mings’ into orbit, will only have worsened things.
The sad part of this is that a football tournament that, mostly, provided a beacon of hope for inclusion and social cohesion, ended with a stark return to the behaviour that most right-minded people had hoped had disappeared. Of course, it hadn’t, and like a resurgent disease, had simply found somewhere to lay low. On Sunday it erupted. It was sad enough to lose a final on penalties, but nothing - nothing - in any players’ miss, whether Saka, Rashford or Sancho this time, Chris Waddle and Stuart Pearce in 1990, or Gareth Southgate himself in 1996, warrants the level of ferocity that now, in the age of social media anonymity, has been directed at the latest three players. Even more so the colour of their skin.
The genuinely frightening thing, however, is that in a country where I’d thought myriad minority cultures are accepted and integrated, and in particular, the offensive attitudes towards black football players that blighted the British game as recently as the 1980s, are still there, and they have an outlet. And it’s all part and parcel of a country that has become divided by the politicians who are meant to lead and unite us. It comes from the top.
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