By Tony Attwood
Some chanting in football grounds is appalling, but with concerted effort it can be stopped. And indeed over the years Arsenal have made that concerted effort to get rid of certain chants at home games. My perception from afar is that Liverpool and Man U have made less effort, Man U notoriously even allowing a song with the most appalling slanders against Mr Wenger to appear on a set of songs that it sold via its on line shop, at one stage.
We also know that Uefa has been ludicrously ineffective at stopping racist chanting in Eastern Europe particularly, with only occasional bans, and fines that are so small they are hardly noticed.
But now Uefa have had a go at Liverpool over a charge of what Uefa rather oddly calls “illicit chanting”.
When this charge first came out it was thought that it referred to chants by Liverpool fans concerning the Manchester Utd Munich air crash in 1958 and by Man U fans concerning the Hillsborough disaster. These chants have been heard at Liverpool v Man U games at both grounds, but it seems that neither club has found a way to deal with such matters.
However it seems that the chant that offended the Uefa inspector was “Manchester is full of shit”. Rather amusingly, some newspapers have reported this as “Manchester is full of s***” presumably because their readerships are such a delicate bunch of flowers that they a) don’t know what the *** stands for and are thus protected, and that b) even if they did know what the *** stood for, they would be mortally offended to see “hit” written after “s” and thus sales of the paper might go down.
But Uefa is getting into a tangle over crowd affairs these days, having also suggested and then unsuggested that they were annoyed over the booing of the Uefa National Anthem (Uefa now following the line of Fifa in considering itself a SuperState and thus entitled to a National Anthem). But I suppose Uefa is always in a muddle.
Liverpool have already been charged with setting off fireworks, throwing objects, and other forms of crowd disturbances that caused the delay in the kick-off at the start of the second half at Man U – something that Uefa hates since it interferes with TV scheduling. Man U are charged with the fact that their fans blocked stairways and that there were crowd disturbances.
Oh shit, sorry oh s*** what a pile of it…. Uefa that is…
Now I must say that I have never been in Liverpool or Manchester but surely there must be some s*** around as well… where there are people there is some s*** around. King, Emperor even the big bosses of uefa … we all produce it like it or not.
Having said that of course not all chanting is of good taste and some would be good to not sing but at the place where they play the sport of the common people one can expect the language and chants of the common people. But the big bosses of Uefa are too far away from the common people to have any bond with them I guess…
Maybe one should sing in the future: Uefa is full of shit, sorry s***
This is all a bit ‘smoke and mirrors’ as they’re minor incidents compared to what happens in eastern Europe. Yes it should be stopped but until they make some major improvements in Eastern Europe, it’s just cleaning the windows whilst the leaking sewer pipe makes the house uninhabitable…
A little off topic. Just read that Emmanuel Ebouye has been banned for not paying an agent.
Personally I would give him a medal for not paying a ‘leech on the game’. Agents are truly the worst leeches on football. They make no contribution to the game apart from ‘milking funds’ on behalf of their charges. This eventually leads to more costs for us punters.