“OI! DUTCH PEOPLE! WHERE DO WE queue?” a bemused middle-aged woman shouted outside the Philips Stadion in Eindhoven last Wednesday. How English is that? Unable to make any basic communication with the locals she’s reduced to random shouting at passers-by and what does she want to do? Queue! Priceless.
It is hard to work out how to get into that ground if you’re hunting the away end. Vak MM (our entrance) doesn’t appear to exist. It’s all gone a bit platform 9¾ for the Hogwarts Express. I couldn’t remember how we’d got in there two years ago when Arsenal last played Pay-eSh-Vay away, though I was sure the tunnel over our heads was involved.
Then, from behind an eight-feet high steel fence on the other side of the road, could be heard: “Vieira whoh-oh, Patrick Vieira whoh-oh-oh-oh”. Our rabble had been herded in there. You have to pass your ticket through the turnstile to a steward before they’ll even think about letting you in. Then at the top of some stairs there’s a vigorous frisking before you’re allowed through the steel and concrete tube into your grotty corner of the ground.
Inside, not a steward in sight. People sit wherever they want, block the gangways and exits, pee in the stairwells and, if they were of a mind, could chant racist abuse unmolested. In front is a vast net to stop missiles being thrown. To prevent you leaping 30 feet down on to the tier below and injuring yourself there is a perspex screen and a steel and barbed wire barrier. More barbed wire runs along both sides on top of ten more feet of steel mesh fencing.
It all feels a bit too penitentiary for my taste, right down to the detail that not all of the inmates get to watch the TV at the same time. I couldn’t see the screen from my seat although I was a bit nearer the heaters in the roof being right up the back. Inevitably, penned in, bored, uncomfortable, the inmates are left with little choice but to follow the inevitable path chosen for them by the authorities.
They get out their gear and skin up.
They get as drugged-up as chimps in an Oxford research facility. They’ve bought so much weed and hash since they arrived in the Netherlands that they are each hunched over their own individual reefers trying to finish it all before they have to go home. No passing round of joints here, just committed smoking and some concerted giggling.
No one is of a mind to chant racist abuse from the Arsenal end anyway, thankfully it’s been a long time since Tottenham Hotspur fans were taunted with abhorrent songs about gassing the Jews and the mass hissing that passed for mimicry of the gas chambers on the old North Bank. Spurs do get a mention though, as they always do when Arsenal play in Europe: “Tottenham! Watching EastEnders . . .”
So the hint printed on our match ticket, “PSV against racism”, is unnecessary. That appears to be aimed more at their own fans, who had abused Thierry Henry and co during Arsenal’s 4-0 win in 2002. I hadn’t heard it on the night, but being tucked away up in the roof in Shawshank corner means you can only hear your own fans. In fact all the high-security metalwork seems more to do with Dutch hooliganism than insurgents and agitators from abroad like our bunch of stoners.
PSV or Ajax or Feyenoord. That’ll be your Dutch champions, then. Eindhoven (only the fifth largest city in the Netherlands, that’s one for QI fans), Amsterdam or Rotterdam. The fans have been chasing each other around for years. Now they can ship them to PSV by train and take them directly into the Stadion literally without touching the ground, as there is a railway line right outside. From the platform and straight down the tube.
These rivals detest one another and on Wednesday came another example of how — while success in the the Champions League is a badge of honour for the game’s high achievers — the fans will always have their passions stirred by domestic conflicts first and foremost.The trigger-happy ref cheered the locals by dishing out yellow cards to our boys as if he was in some officials’ quick-draw contest. Consequently Patrick Vieira (whose “stupidity defied belief” according to one habitually mistaken haughty broadsheet critic) sliding in to take the ball out of play and bouncing a PSV winger into the air like a frigate swamping a yacht was ludicrously dispatched to the dressing-room to be reunited with Lauren (whose second yellow came from a Shaolin Soccer-like error of judgment). Had this ref witnessed the work of Gary Neville on José Reyes recently, he’d have phoned the police.
M Wenger had some rearranging to do and introduced Robin van Persie, the gifted Dutchman. Bedlam. Derision, screaming, whistling and any amount of abuse followed the ex-Feyenoord wonderboy all over the field. Suddenly, in a two v two break, he had the chance to put Henry in but he blazed over the bar in an attempt to score and stick it to his tormentors. Henry stared at him for a good five minutes after that, which must have been worse than the abuse. Ten minutes later he crashed into a tackle and didn’t get up.
As Van Persie exited on a stretcher the abuse did not subside but became louder, as if they thought it was their last chance before he had his X-ray. He played as if affected by it, reminding me of Ashley Cole’s admirable rage in the Bernabéu. Derision for a player who once starred for your rival is one thing, but the mystery of the monkey chant is another. An incomprehensible thing.
Last season, I wrote about Big Ron’s Mistake in Monaco and said that casual racist abuse “pisses me off”. I saw an old friend of mine soon after and he said there was no need for me to state that as it was apparent from my column and I took his point.
Now it feels like there is a need to state it. What’s going on? When I was a student in Kent in the Eighties, I went to see Canterbury City play Enfield in an FA Cup qualifier. This was a big event for the Men Of Kent, a giant-killing opportunity and the tiny stand was packed as was the touchline all round the pitch. As soon as the game began, so did the racist abuse. Enfield had four or five black players and Canterbury it transpired harboured several thuggish, stupid white men who were too intimidating to be quietened. A few people spoke up but were threatened. This poisonous bile continued throughout and I ended up longing for Enfield to win. They did and I never went back.
Some say the monkey chant is inevitable in countries with no mass immigration or colonial past but that means pretty much everywhere but England and France. In England, the BNP recently forced the cancellation of a gig in Burnley by Jeremy Hardy, comic and QI panellist. He’s got no time for them and has the temerity, wit and courage to say so. They, I suspect, love a monkey chant but don ’t do it in the council chamber.
It’s disagreeable to say, as the amiable Xabi Alonso did when put on the spot post-match that we shouldn’t talk about it when there was so much to talk about that was less unpleasant, or as Rafa Benítez said, that to mention it just grants them publicity. If you’ve got a dog and you come home to find he’s crapped on your carpet it’s absurd to say that the rest of the carpet is lovely and the furniture a joy. You’ve got a turd in your house.
At the Bernabéu the dog has swastika tattoos and does Nazi salutes. Find him, prosecute him, ban him. Rub his nose in it. As for that moron at Blackburn who did the monkey chant at Dwight Yorke, he’s just lucky it wasn’t Paul Ince or Ian Wright. Racism, casual or menacing, really pisses me off.
