Trigger, trigger, trigger; shoot that n*****. Which fucking n*****? That fucking n*****!”
It was Old Trafford, January 1989, and during the FA Cup third round tie against Queens Park Rangers, Manchester United’s Stretford End supporters started to single out defender Paul Parker for some special treatment.
What followed next has become part of football legend. Parker made a “gun” with his fingers, pointed it at his head, looked up at the sea of 10,000 faces and pretended to shoot himself in the head. Those racist bigots who thought they could humiliate and intimidate Rangers’ England defender were silenced. Parker had confronted and outwitted them.
Parker, who would sign for United two years later, had previously experienced plenty of such revolting bile from the terraces. “Black players used to get a lot of racist abuse when we travelled north,” he told me. “At Leeds United their fans would sing: ‘There ain't no black in the Union Jack, send the bastards back.’ Years later, when I was with Manchester United, it was a relief to go to Elland Road and get abuse because of the colour of my jersey rather than the colour of my skin. I almost smiled when they called me a red bastard rather than a black one. Yorkshire was the worse place to go in the Eighties, though.”
There were plenty of racists at football elsewhere. I once went to Upton Park early in the mid-Nineties to start selling copies of United We Stand fanzine. A Pakistani United fan came to talk to me, then three big West Ham fans approached us, perhaps irritated that we were on their patch.
“That’s a nice watch for a fat Paki,” said one of them. “Wouldn’t it be a shame if we took it off you?” I was scared, the other fan too.
The language was vile, but while not isolated, it wasn’t unheard of either.
“When Paul Canonville, the first black footballer to play for Chelsea, made his debut, more than half the ground erupted in fury,” recalls Chelsea fan Adam Porter. “I was there, I remember a mother and daughter screaming abuse at our bench from the east stand for us having a black player coming on. There was mass hysteria. There were monkey noises at our own player – and this wasn’t isolated. I ran on to the pitch at the end because it was the last game of the season and hugged Canonville. Ken Bates appeared – he’d also come onto the pitch to escort him off safely.”
Chelsea had clear racist elements in their support back then. “You could get your name embroidered on a Chelsea jumper in the club shop,” explains Porter. “People would get ‘British Movement’ or ‘National Front’ sewn on instead. There were awful chants about Tottenham and Auschwitz. My dad is Jewish and it was painful to sit with him. Leaflets would be passed around about there being too many Jews in the east stand. My dad started on loads of lads for singing: ‘Like a yid standing on a five pence piece, we shall not be moved.’ I thought we’d get beaten up. These people were hard to stand up to, but we did. Yet these people are not dead. It’s a very different time, but some of them still go to Chelsea. Going to Chelsea has really changed – we have a Jewish owner for one. I took my ten-year-old son to the Manchester City game on Saturday. There was a lot of bad language, though I didn’t hear any racism. The men behind me who swore all match were actually very complimentary about Raheem Sterling. Sterling’s response on Instagram was first rate. It was straight out of Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent in how the media frames debates and agenda.”
What is it like for current players? “There’s discreet racism,” Devante Cole tells me, a striker now at Burton Albion. “I had one obvious incident when I was with City at Atletico Madrid in the Uefa Youth League, monkey noises from the crowd. I was raging about it and complained and City took up my complaint. Ryan Brewster, from Liverpool, also had trouble in the Youth League.
“Raheem Sterling is right – I can see how newspapers create an environment by mentioning the wages of black players. The more people who talk about racism, the better.”
What is it like for fans at games? I go to 90 football games each year around the world and see little obvious racism, but I’m a middle-aged white man – would I see it? “When I started going to games regularly in the early Nineties, racism wasn’t rare,” explains Mancunian Justin Mottershead. “The good thing for me was seeing how other fans reacted if they saw or heard something racist. It became unacceptable among supporters. I never felt unsafe or intimidated as a young mixed-race fan attending football matches.”
“I can almost count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard racist abuse towards players recently, but that’s obviously still too many. I was at Stamford Bridge a few years ago when John Terry had been charged with abusing Anton Ferdinand. On the one hand you had United fans singing, ‘Where’s your racist centre half?’ which I was happy to join in with. But then they were singing: ‘Ashley Cole you’re a choc ice.’ Which didn’t sit right with me at all and I stayed silent as I would never use that term towards another person. We’ve also heard the Romelu Lukaku chant that made the headlines. Sometimes fans sing songs or use language they don’t feel is offensive, but it can be and that’s why I think it’s important to have these discussions. I’d hate for my kids to have to hear anything that puts them off going back to a football game.”
“I’ve only ever encountered two problems,” says Jagroop Dhillow, who goes home and away with Manchester United. “Once at City away, walking to the away end, I got a ‘fuck off you Paki’, even though I’m Indian. The other was at Stoke away in 2013. I was 14 and got a remark about ‘Pakis and tourists taking our tickets’. I was asked why I was there by a so-called United fan.”
Things are now much, much better in English football, but as we saw last week with events at Chelsea, there are still issues. But thankfully there is also far less tolerance of racist behaviour of any kind.
Read more:
Raheem Sterling: 'In the end, people will see the real me and accept the real me.'
Burning Grenfell on Guy Fawkes Night shows how racist Britain can be.
