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| Chelsea skipper John Terry |
Before you answer 'yes' or 'sure will' to that, have a think whether the reason you feel duty bound to heckle the England skipper is simply because you think he is a racist.
Following the game between Chelsea and QPR at the end of October, comments allegedly made by Terry to Anton Ferdinand were reported to the powers that be and the result is that he'll face CPS criminal charges in February. As fate would have it, the two teams clash in the FA Cup next week.
The build up to a possible showdown between Terry and Ferdinand will build and build in the media next week. Before that, Carrow Road is in the strange position of hosting Terry's last game before that big Loftus Road fourth round clash.
Should he play next week, he's likely to be in for one hell of an afternoon from the home crowd, just like he was when he played at Tottenham after is was announced that criminal charges would be brought.
Back then Tottenham sent out a warning to fans that any derogatory chants would be punished and Metropolitan Police officers wore headcams to detect perpetrators.
But up in Norfolk there have been no warnings. How will the Norfolk crowd respond to Terry before the game starts and how have the club dealt with racism in the past?
Labels that stick
Google the name John Terry and the next word that suggestively comes up in the search engine box is 'racist'. A combination of his less than glorious off the field history and the fact that football fans don't need much ammunition to give a player both barrels, means he's already been convinced of being a racist by the average fan.
That's the same average fan who thinks Frank Lampard is 'fat' and Graeme Le Saux was 'gay'.
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| Tottenham's Gareth Bale had the last laugh after he was abused by the Snakepit at Carrow Road |
The abuse for Wickham was predictable, the abuse of Bale was maybe just banter. But change the word 'chimp' for 'ape' and direct it at a black player and it's not so funny.
But booing Terry before Saturday's game, such as when his name is read out, could be a case of, pardon the pun, the pot calling the kettle black.
I'd argue that the average Snakepit knucklehead who'll brand Terry a 'w****r' or boo his every touch on Saturday, is or has probably actually been a racist in their own life at some point.
Welcome to Norwich - A White City
The average Norwich fan comes from Norfolk and anyone over the age of 30 has probably had relatively little exposure to black people in the past.
I'm 36 and went to school in the Norfolk countryside in the early 80s. The first black kid I came across was when I was 11 and at my high school, The Hewett, here were maybe five black kids out of 1,500.
Norwich was, to quote the BNP, the 'last white city in England' and that was something that was commonly said when I was at school.
I remember in the late 1980s a robbery at a jewellers in London Street, Norwich. It was carried out by three black men and, such was the shortage of similar-skinned police staff to play the role of the criminals in the reconstruction that white police officers were issued with black boot polish to darken their faces.
This was Norwich less than 25 years ago.
Football wise, when I was born in 1975 a black player still hadn't played for England and I remember around 1982 reading Match magazine and them having an article on Watford's coloured attackers Luther Blissett and John Barnes - the headline to the piece was 'Black Magic'.
That wouldn't happen now, but Norwich were among the first teams to have black players in the late 1970s with the Fashanu brothers, who were actually adopted by a family near Attleborough where I grew up.
Monkeys and bananas
At Carrow Road the first black player I recall seeing apart from Dale Gordon and Louie Donowa was Sunderland's Howard Gayle and I clearly remember hearing monkey chants coming from Canaries fans directed at him.
A couple of years later when Ruel Fox burst onto the scene at Carrow Road, visiting fans would make the 'ooh ooh' noise when he touched the ball and the quick-thinking Barclay would cover it over with a louder "Ru-el, Ru-el".
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| Shocking: John Barnes kicks away a banana, thrown at him by an Everton fan in the late 1980s |
In the late 1980s, a racist chant was seen by many as just a bit of fun and of course it was in no way punishable. I remember going through the Barclay turnstile circa 1989 with an unopened can of Coke that was taken off me straight away by a policeman as it was a potential missile. That was not on inside Carrow Road, but making a monkey chant was.
Fast forward 20-odd years and those rules have both been turned on their heads.
Thankfully at Norwich we've generally been free of racist incidents. When Adrian Forbes started playing for Norwich in the same position as Fox, the City fans would chant 'Ru-el, Ru-el' at him in partial homage to Fox, but also because he was, well, also black.
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| Monkey chants: Ruel Fox was one City player who had them from visiting fans |
Perhaps the most alarming incident I've witnessed in supporting Norwich for more than 25 years was just over a year after Diop's swift Carrow Road exit and it came at Hillsborough in the FA Cup clash between City and Sheffield Wednesday in January 2001.
The Owls fielded former City striker Efan Ekoku in their starting line up and, with the game merely a few minutes old, a City fan stood up in front of me and addressed Ekoku, who was standing close to the City fans with the words: "Efan you c**n c**t."
He was thrown out immediately by a couple of South Yorkshire Coppers and rightly so. Since then as, Britain moved into the more politically correct 2000s, incidents like that are rare off the pitch.
The situation now
Norwich has never been a more multi-cultural city than it is now but the attitude of some City fans still borders on the Neanderthal. Last summer, when City signed James Vaughan from Everton, Norwich fan Luke O'Donoughoe was banned from Carrow Road for life after posting Twitter comments about Vaughan.
O'Donoughoe triggered a huge outcry from fellow Twitter users, including media pundit Mark Bright, following a post on May 27 in which he is said to have used the racist word 'n****r'.
At the time club chief executive David McNally said no form of racism is tolerated. He added: 'It's a shame as we are a family club. We were made aware of an alleged racist comment via Twitter and we had to investigate. We have a zero tolerance approach."
This season, though, with the Terry case, the Luis Suarez/ Patrice Evra incident and that of Oldham's on-loan City midfielder Tom Adeyami at Anfield, racism has reared it's ugly head around football.
The majority of City's fans have no racist spleen to vent on the average Saturday at Carrow Road and thankfully we've moved on several generations from the dark days of the late 1980s.
I hope nobody decides to boo Terry on Saturday just because of his reputation. Terry said after City played Chelsea in August that he didn't enjoy playing against Grant Holt and that battle is sure to commence once the game starts. But there's no reason to boo Terry before the game.
I don't particularly like Terry and I'm not trying to defend him, but remember David McNally's words: "City are a family club and have a zero approach to racism."
Norwich are a fantastic club and most of our fans are the sort any club would love to have – just this week we’ve been praised through the roof for an impeccably observed tribute to West Brom’s Jeff Astle at the Hawthorns last Saturday.
By all means get on his case if he does something on the pitch, but let's keep things in perspective. Terry will be dealt with by the authorities and will be punished if there are grounds to do so.
So let's not drag our great club back to the grim days of the 1980s with idiotic booing or derogatory chanting on Saturday. We, as a club, are better than that.
Very interesting post this... I believe that despite the relative isolation Norfolk has experienced over recent years from multiculturalism, its people are on the whole very accepting of all forms of newcomers. Unfortunately through an innocent ignorance Norfolk people perhaps express themselves inappropriately when they are in fact meaning know malice but affection.
ReplyDeleteWith Terry in mind there are many instances separate from recent racist claims that we are aware of. Indeed, it was at the beginning of his career when Chelsea played at Carrow Road in the FA Cup that Terry was in the headlines after being arrested in one of those nightclub incidents.
I do however fear for the small minded minority of said Snakepit who clearly aren't the brightest. That is the thing, they are perhaps not inherently racist, just a bit thick.