OH LORDY, here’s a conundrum for a Sunday morning: whose side do we take in the argument between El Hadji Diouf and a bunch of Everton supporters? It’s a close call. Diouf claims he was racially abused by Everton fans and was pelted with bananas. However, Everton are calling for an apology because they have studied footage of the game against Diouf’s lumpen Blackburn Rovers and cannot find, anywhere, a single piece of soft fruit on the pitch, not even a loganberry.

(Would pelting a black player with loganberries be racist? What about vegetables, for example swiss chard or purple sprouting broccoli? Are they okay, politically? It is high time the FA and the government adjudicated on such matters, otherwise I will be in a quandary next time I’m in Sainsbury’s before a match.) Diouf’s next move may be to suggest that he secretly ate the banana and concealed the skin about his person. Or to fess up that he was lying through his teeth in an attempt to get out of a charge of racism that has been levelled at him. I mean, be honest; why would you need to racially abuse El Hadji Diouf when there are so many other things you might shout at him? Even a lifelong member of the Ku Klux Klan would surely accept that Diouf’s race is the least objectionable thing about him. (Not that his race is objectionable in the first place, of course. I didn’t mean that. Oh God, here come the Old Bill . . . ) Abusing Diouf for being black is like abusing Alan Carr for being gay — a complete irrelevance and a sadly missed opportunity.

But then there’s the Everton ballboy who, it seemed to me, propelled the ball in an insolent and even aggressive manner at the sulking Senegalese phlegm-merchant, rather than towards him, and is now whining that he was called a “white boy” as a consequence by Diouf. Well, he is a white boy, isn’t he? What’s your problem, son? The kid might have had a case if Diouf had said: “Watch your step, you little scally **** or I’ll glaze your face in spittle.”

But now the police are involved and it has all become terribly messy. Frankly, hauling up a black player for perpetrating a “hate crime” by calling someone white seems, to me, a bit rich, given the history of how black players have been treated in the English game this past 150 years or so. Not least, one might add, at Everton, whose fans once sang with Neanderthal jubilation: “We’re the whites of Merseyside!” They were perfectly happy to call themselves white then (and it wasn’t so very long ago) — so why shouldn’t El Hadji Diouf be allowed to concur? If I were the Old Bill I’d be tempted to forget about the whole thing and try instead to sort out one or two burglaries in the Merseyside area, regardless of how loudly some sections of the Gwladys Street End are revelling in the sweet luxury of victimhood. But then I’ve had my own run-in with the Merseyside police and of all the qualities one might associate with them, sentience was not high on the list.

Now, though, Harry Redknapp has got himself involved by calling for all people who shout out racist things at football matches to be locked up “in the nuthouse”. Harry has a long memory: he remembers West Ham’s Clyde Best, one of the first black footballers to play at the highest level, being subjected to abuse week in, week out. He has a point: in the late 1970s, whenever a black player appeared on the pitch at Middlesbrough I remember the home crowd singing — to the tune of Boney M’s Brown Girl In The Ring, if you’re interested — “Nigger on the pitch, tra-la-la-la-la.” And people really did throw bananas, before bananas became expensive during the three-day week.

Nor did the abuse stop as black players became more established in the game in the mid-1980s. The abuse changed, for sure — Chelsea fans sang: “We all agree, our coons are better than your coons” — but I think we can still be sure that this was racist abuse. At my club, Millwall, there were monkey chants in the 1980s, almost always directed at opposing large black centre-forwards who almost always scored a goal against us, perhaps as a consequence. Or at least I assumed it was a consequence. It’s certainly the sort of thing that would make me bust a gut to score. I used to wish our fans would stop the chants, partly because I don’t like racism and partly for the less morally upright reason that I just knew it would rebound upon us sooner or later.

Meanwhile, Stoke City have apologised to Blackpool’s Jason Euell for the racist abuse he received in a recent game. That is entirely to their credit; Stoke are an admirable club punching well above their weight but, to judge from the city’s voting record lately and its profusion of BNP councillors, it has a higher racist element than most other towns in the country. The action of the club, measured but unequivocal, seems to me in proportion to the crime, unlike the ludicrous business with El Hadji Diouf, which — on both sides — has the whiff of cant about it.