“You have to let the people above deal with it and I will carry on playing my game.” So said Emile Heskey, the England striker, in the aftermath of Wednesday's 4-1 victory against Croatia, during which he was taunted by racist monkey chants. The sad reality is that he is used to worse. The forward has always borne the brunt of the abuse because he is very dark skinned whereas Theo Walcott, a more obvious target in Zagreb given that he sank Croatia with three goals, was ignored because he is lighter skinned. This is how it is on the road in football, particularly in eastern Europe. The Football Association has demanded an official investigation into Wednesday's abuse and this is one area where the English governing body, so often the butt of jokes, can hand out the lectures. The transformation in our national sport in recent decades, and the fight against bigotry, has been one of the great success stories, perhaps the greatest, of the English game. And, boy, we haven't had much else to crow about since 1966.
When Paul Ince's appointment as manager of Blackburn Rovers this summer made headlines because he became the first English black manager in the top division, many said, about time, pointing to an underlying prejudice. But it was equally possible to interpret his advance as a sign of how far we have come.
If this country has become a more tolerant, understanding, multicultural society, if our sitcoms can no longer be scripted with words such as coon or nig-nog, as used to be commonplace in Love Thy Neighbour 30 years ago, then football has not only reflected but perhaps even been at the vanguard of that advance. A third of our league is now made up of black players. They have become heroes, icons, when they were regularly on the receiving end of vile abuse within the past couple of decades.
In his acclaimed book Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby wrote of watching John Barnes's debut for Liverpool at Arsenal in 1987 when Barnes was pelted with “banana after banana” - and that was from the Liverpool supporters. They were the same fans, presumably, who had daubed “No Wogs Allowed” on to the gates at Anfield on the day that Barnes signed. Hornby perfectly describes the anxious norm of watching football through the Seventies, Eighties and into the early Nineties as black players became increasingly prevalent. “When an opposing black player commits a foul, or misses a good chance, or doesn't miss a chance, or argues with the referee,” Hornby wrote, “you sit quivering with liberal foreboding. ‘Please don't say anything, anybody' you sit muttering to yourself.”
It has been a long struggle but one waged so successfully that Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, is moved to describe British football as “a European role model for tolerance in sport”. Weaving together social advances, the growing number and contribution of black players, the clamping down on hooliganism and the modernisation of our stadiums, which followed the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in which 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death, it is now the exception rather than the norm to hear racial abuse from anything other than an isolated idiot - at least in the club context.
We should note that watching England, particularly abroad, brings back all the old fears. “No surrender to the IRA” remains a terrace favourite, even after the organisation's disbandment. And it would be stretching the point beyond credibility to declare that our football grounds are free of menace, however corporate they have become. As Hornby writes: “It's not much to be grateful for, really, the fact that a man calls another man a c*** but not a black c***.” Still, it is a lot more than you could hope for across swaths of Europe, and not just to the east. Florence was the first place that I heard abuse so shocking I could scarcely believe my ears and, coming against the sophisticated backdrop of the Uffizi Gallery, the monkey noises seemed particularly grotesque. Manchester United were playing against Fiorentina and every time Andy Cole or Dwight Yorke touched the ball, it was to a barrage of “oooh, oooh, oooh”.
Every black player suffered when the England team travelled to Madrid to face Spain in November 2004 on one of football's most shameful evenings. In protest at the Spanish coach, Luis Aragonés, who had referred to Thierry Henry as a “black s**t”, the England team had worn “Kick Out Racism” T-shirts to training. It provoked an appalling soundtrack of ape sounds and this was not from some hardcore section of lunatics but across the stadium; from men in smart suits, their wives too. Spain's FA was fined a pathetic £44,750 by Uefa, the European governing body, which talks a good game about fighting racism and hands out pamphlets and erects banners but lacks the courage to impose meaningful sanctions. Yesterday it launched a “different languages, one goal” campaign with the European Commission but serial offenders such as Croatia continue to escape with a slap on the wrist.
The loathsome Aragonés was fined £2,000 by the Spanish football authorities for his outburst before a court cleared him of racist conduct. He described his choice of words as “colloquial language” and protested: “I'm obliged to motivate my players to get the best results.” If we were to be particularly forgiving we might see his remarks as the ranting of an ignorant old man, but it goes without saying that he would have been out of a job by teatime had he been manager of England. Instant resignation from ITV was required of “Big” Ron Atkinson - or “Bigot Ron” as he became on the front page of The Sun - after he was caught on microphone disparaging Marcel Desailly, the Chelsea defender, as a “f***ing lazy thick n*****”.
To make comparisons with our European neighbours is to open up a whole debate about immigration and multiculturalism. In defence of Spain, John Carlin wrote in The Times recently that the sudden influx of African immigrants in the past 15 years was the same process that Britain underwent in the Sixties. Tensions are to be expected. Similarly, a spokesman for the Croatia football federation pointed to a growing proliferation of black footballers “which has helped the supporters understand”. That process of integration is clearly a work in progress.
To point the finger is also to risk an accusation of hypocrisy given that English football has exported hooliganism to just about every major continental city in the past 30 years. The last thing we can afford to be is smug or complacent, which is why, despite the success of the anti-racism campaigns, the football authorities continue to declare war on prejudice. Capturing fewer headlines than the Ince promotion, but perhaps equally significant, was the summer appointment of Lord Ouseley as the first black person to sit on the FA Council, that ancient gathering of old men in blazers where the only change in membership normally comes if someone drops dead.
Lord Ouseley, the former chief executive of the Commission for Racial Equality, has been made chairman of the FA's new Race Equality Advisory Group (REAG). “The FA has done brilliantly in removing the air of ‘nastiness' that used to be associated with the fan base a few years ago,” Lord Ouseley says, but there must still be work to be done for REAG to have been instituted.
For instance, only one player, Michael Chopra, the Cardiff City striker, has come through to the professional leagues from an Asian background. Is that because, as Lord Ouseley says, “Asian kids have traditionally been steered towards cricket” and other professions or because the English game has a deep-seated prejudice?
Robbie Earle, the former Wimbledon player turned ITV pundit, who also sits on the REAG committee, says that he still attends too many discussions in which senior football figures refer to “your lot”. So would he apply for a manager's job? Does he think his colour would hold him back? “That's a good question. I wouldn't be afraid of applying but the very fact that people would comment on my colour cannot be correct. I was shell-shocked as a young player going to somewhere such as the old Den at Millwall. Back in the Eighties, there were pockets around the country, Yorkshire, the North East, where you knew abuse was inevitable.
“It is a lot better from the terraces now, but the fact that we are still talking about Paul Ince's appointment in terms of colour shows why we need committees such as REAG. Racism is like a cancer. You must always be vigilant.”
There is a line from comedian Chris Rock that if you know how many black people have been guests in your house, you have a problem. On that basis, perhaps the media's fascination with Ince as our first black English manager in the Premier League informs us that, whatever the problems in the rest of Europe, the battle is not yet fully won over here.
