Let's Kick It Out!

By Neil Ravenscroft
November 26 2002

There has been a lot of discussion on other message boards recently about racism at Bescot. There have been some disturbing incidents lately, including an idiot waving a Nazi flag at one away game, an incident which did the good name of the football club no good at all.

Although it is not something that I have experienced personally in recent times, I have been reliably informed that there are still pockets of racist behaviour and chanting which raise their ugly head from time to time at the ground. The thing that always makes me wonder is why?

Football is the one universal sport in this world. There are 191 countries who are members of the United Nations and yet, there are a grand total of 203 affiliated to FIFA. (I know that there are four home countries in FIFA and only one in the UN, but have no idea where the discrepancy is with the other 9, so answers on a postcard please). The growth of the game in Africa in recent years has been astonishing and everyone has marvelled at times at the skills of the Nigerian and Cameroon teams in particular, leading to a situation where top European teams are full of black players from the African continent. The performance of Senegal at the World Cup this year has reinforced that trend.

Japan and Korea also performed well at the World Cup this year, and the sudden appearance of Chinese players at the top level in Europe shows that that particular country is also improving rapidly.

The performance of black players for the South American teams, Brazil especially, needs no further comment from me!

Thirty years ago, there were few black players in this country and they all were the targets for the crudest kind of racial abuse. Just as bad as the overt abuse, however, was the institutionalised racism perpetrated by football league clubs. The standard comments were they would not have the mental strength to be able to play the game at the highest level, that they would not have the application to be able to make it at the highest grade, that they may have been skilful, but would not be able to put those skills into practice and other such total garbage. This was despite the fact that the evidence was already there that one of the greatest footballers in history, Pele, was black!

Eventually, the performance of the black players themselves in the English League, coupled with their breakthrough at International level, pioneered by Viv Anderson, meant that their true worth to the game became apparent. What we seemed to be left with amongst those few die hard racist fans who survived the revolution was the child like attitude that players did not count as black if they played for your team, the kind of idiocy that was only practiced by the apartheid regime in South Africa at its most stupid, when they could declare important black visitors (when it suited them) as honorary whites!

The rise of the far right in several European countries (including this one, to judge by the BNP performance in Lancashire) and their concentration on recruiting disaffected youth is the reason that the problem does seem to be growing again. These are not necessarily the poor of society either (the standard uniform is expensive enough), but those who feel cut off by the political process and from the values of society. These disaffected youths are also the very people who were responsible for a great deal of the so called football violence (as very little of it was to do with the game) when it was at its worst in the 70s and 80s and so, a tenuous link between extremist right wing politics and football was made. Among a few of the crowd at Bescot (and it is a few), overt racism is a political dogma and a way of life. It is incumbent on all of us to make sure that this problem does not tarnish the reputation we have of being a friendly club.

This is, I am sure, something that every true Walsall fan would agree with, but I am afraid, it is time I got controversial again. You see, I believe that the kind of institutionalised racism that the Afro Caribbean players suffered from thirty years ago is still with us, in the form of similar attitudes being taken to Asian footballers. The same so called opinions, about bottle and application are expressed about the kids from the Asian community as were against the players of West Indian origin. It is almost certainly something that will not change, until there is a successful player of Indian or Pakistani origin in the professional game. When that day comes, however, and it will come, the change in attitudes will surely follow.

As far as Walsall FC is concerned, I do have a purely selfish motive for this argument. You see, this whole train of thought was sparked off by the replies to my match reaction this week, when I said that we should be getting bigger crowds, when you look at the population of the town. The implication of the reply was that we should right off the 15 or so percent of the population whose origins are from the Indian sub continent, as they are not interested in football. That assumption is wrong. If you talk to the kids, they are as passionate about football as anyone else, but they do not feel any affiliation to their local clubs. (The vast proportion are armchair Arsenal, Man Utd and Liverpool fans, I am afraid). That is the reason I have to disagree with 4Two about the club running coaching courses for Asian kids. We need to get all of the children in the Borough interested in football by watching their local team, not by being sucked into the marketing ploys of the big teams in the Premier League. 15 percent of a population of 250,000 is 37,500 people, of whom some 7,500 to 10,000 of are, probably, children under the age of 18. If we only managed to attract one quarter of those to Bescot, we would have another 1,500 to 2,500 people clamouring to get into the ground every week and Jeff Bonser would be having to redraw his spending plans, as we would be generating something like an extra half a million a year in income. The only way you can break the cycle of support for the rich and powerful clubs is by involving kids in their local teams from as early an age as possible and the club are right to be doing as much as possible to achieve this.

Anyway, rant over!