Fitba Hell

There’s a picture on the back page of the Daily Record today of a journalist looking like a plonker and Diego Maradona looking mildly alarmed. The Record wanted to reward Maradona, somewhat belatedly, for knocking England out of the World Cup in 1986. They had a special glass paperweight-cum-trophy, and Maradona looks like he’s afraid he’s going to be lamped. More likely, he’s been caught unawares because there was no pre-arranged photo opportunity – it looks like one of those photos you take of yourself by extending your arm as far away as possible and clicking, invariably producing an unsettlingly leery countenance – and because he can’t quite work out why he’s getting the bauble.

It’s a bit tragic that the greatest moments for a Scottish football fan tend to involve the schadenfreude of seeing England knocked out of tournaments. I used to think those “Scotland’s Player of the Year” t-shirts – Pearce and Waddle in 1990, Southgate in 1996; you get the picture – were a riot. Now I think they're embarrassing. Perhaps it’s because we’re so focused on English defeat that we’re more accepting of our relative mediocrity as a football nation. While other small countries like Holland, Denmark and Uruguay can look back with fondness at their major championship triumphs, it is the 1966 World Cup final that is seared on our consciousness – and fear of a repeat that is our abiding obsession.

I doubt if Diego would have been any less bemused after it was explained what the trophy was for. He’s a winner; the Scots, he must presume from the way we revel in others’ defeat, are inveterate losers who can only hope to drag others down with them.

England fans must hate themselves. It’s hard to conclude otherwise when you see the venom directed at their own any time the national team fails to win. Expectation builds up to a frenzy before tournaments, and when failure inevitably occurs there’s a huge backlash: listen to the Radio 5 or TalkSport phone-ins and hear the strangely exultant hatred that gets directed at the hapless players. The fans revel in the pre-tournament hype and they revel in crushing failure; it’s strangely masochistic.

The vitriol heaped upon David Beckham during radio phone-ins would make you think he was the chief executive of HBOS or Bradford and Bingley, if you’d somehow never heard of him. Beckham, having won more England caps than any other outfield player apart from Bobby Moore, suffers from a cumulative effect. He’s been around for longer than any other England player and is therefore held responsible for more failures than any of his colleagues.

Yet he won’t retire from international football. Like the fans, he keeps coming back for more, in the hope that it’ll one day lead to glory: he is the embodiment of the England fans biennially renewed optimism. When they pour their hate out on him as it all ends in tears again, they’re tipping it all over themselves at the same time.

Well done Walter Smith. Rangers chairman David Murray has been laying into the Rangers bigots for a while now, but I can’t recall Smith ever expressing his disdain for the sectarian “bile” that refuses to dislodge itself from the club so bluntly as he did a couple of days ago. Having the Rangers manager and chairman join forces in this way might just be a watershed at Ibrox, in the same way the signing of high-profile Catholic players by Graeme Souness was 20 years ago.

They’ve still got a long way to go, though. The media likes to portray the Old Firm bigots as knuckle-draggers, almost a different species from their ordinary, decent supporters. Yet as I write on the train this morning, there’s a Northern Irish guy a few yards away from me who’s relaying what he describes as Smith’s “disgraceful comments” to a fellow Rangers supporter. Apparently, Smith is to be respected for what he’s done for Rangers in the past, but this attack of Rangers traditions is out of line and it’s time for him to go. This is no Buckfast-swilling neanderthal: he’s dressed in a pin-striped suit, has some fancy-looking cufflinks, and is reading the Daily Telegraph; we’re on the way to Edinburgh and everything about him screams respectable civil servant.

Sectarianism is not restricted to fringe elements at Rangers – it’s part of the fabric of the club. Which makes Smith’s stance even braver.

Chris Iwelumo has reacted with incredible good grace to the humiliation of that miss against Norway last week. He's had to field constant questions about an incident that's made him an object of derision on YouTube, and done so patiently, openly and without griping about being a figure of fun.

Meanwhile, Kris Boyd has thrown a strop and gone off to pet his lip in a corner because he didn't get a game last week.

Iwelumo's humiliation was far greater than Boyd's, and the reaction of both reveals a little about what type of men they are. I don't care about Boyd's impressive career scoring record or that Iwelumo's a journeyman who got a game because of a handful of impressive performances in England's second tier. Give me Iwelumo over Boyd in a Scotland jersey any day.

Strathclyde Police praised Scotland fans for their good behaviour before and after the World Cup qualifier against Norway last weekend. Isn't this a bit odd when you think about it? Isn't it the sort of thing teachers say about their pupils when they haven't stuck chewing gum on the museum's prize exhibits or mooned passing motorists?

Robinho, despite his his £32million price tag, was not the most significant signing on the last day of the transfer window. The little-noticed (beyond the north-east of Scotland) arrival in Aberdeen of Birmingham’s Sone Aluko deserves that distinction.

Aluko cost about £50,000 – Robinho, to save you the calculation, was 640 times as much – but his departure is symptomatic of all that is wrong with English football. An under-19 England international who marauded past Bayern Munich’s defence while on loan to Aberdeen last season, he’s a wonderful talent that deserves the chance to test himself in the Premier League, but has been squeezed out of even the Championship by clubs that prefer to look for sure things from abroad than take a chance on homegrown raw talent.

The English national team is already suffering from a drying-up of decent young players, and stars whose huge salaries mean they just don’t care that much about playing for their country. (Put the recent thumping of Croatia to one side – remember what happened after a foreign manager masterminded a 5-1 win in Germany seven years ago?) Its underachievement is a symptom of the disease: clubs which are willing to sell their soul to any dubious source of mind-boggling sums of cash.

The transfers of Robinho and Aluko on the same day were a symbolic moment for English football: feeding the egos of millionaire owners now trumps the development of indigenous talent.

Gary Megson must be the most spectacularly short-sighted manager of all time.

With a chance of winning the UEFA Cup - a competition the club had celebrated gaining entry into with gusto last year - he chose to field a reserve team against Sporting Lisbon last month. Not surprisingly, Lisbon won. Megson had prioritised escaping relegation from the Premier League, and rested his best players for that challenge.

What a blunder: winning a European trophy makes a manager and his team a semi-mythical part of their club's history, revered down the ages. Look at the misty-eyed reflection in Aberdeen newspapers just now as the 25th anniversary of the Dons' European Cup Winners' Cup pumping of Real Madrid approaches; consider the reverence in which Celtic's Lisbon Lions are held, or the fond memories of the club's run to the UEFA Cup final in 2003 (against the blurring of one league title into the memory of another); Brian Clough's extraordinary success with Nottingham Forest reverberates down the years more than his almost equally remarkable achievements with Derby County - because Forest won the European Cup twice, and County never did.

You blew it, Megson. You had a shot at leading Bolton to the greatest day in their history, being remembered as a club legend. Now your best chance is to be the workaday manager who once just about kept the club clear of relegation one season - and even that looks unlikely.

No one batted an eyelid the other night when, after Theo Walcott's amazing run to set up Arsenal's equaliser against Liverpool, one TV pundit chose instead to focus on the apparent stupidity of the defender who could have pulled Walcott down to prevent the goal.

A couple of days earlier, one fan each from Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United are assembled on Radio 5 to discuss their team's chances in the Premier League, only to start lobbing wit-free jibes of a level I last heard during a nursery school spat.

No one at United, Chelsea or Manchester City seems to be at all bothered about the dodgy backgrounds of Messrs Glazer, Abramovich or Shinawatra - not while their teams are winning anyway.

Robbie Fowler was widely castigated a few years back for revealing a t-shirt with a message for Liverpool's striking dockers; there's a nervousness among club owners and pundits alike when football and politics start to mix.

For years we were fed the line by much of a shameless media that sectarian abuse spat out by Old Firm fans was just working men getting a bit of frustration off their chests - no harm in it, doesn't mean anything.

There's a common link to the above: football is routinely allowed to exist outwith the standards of behaviour, morality and difficult questions that make up real life.

Rangers’ fans were on spectacularly impotent form on Wednesday night. I was in the Broomloan End with two Partick Thistle-supporting friends, who, along with another 3,000 or so of their ilk, were delighting in raising an index finger to their mouths and shushing ten times as many home fans. Rangers fans just don’t seem to know what to sing these days, now that ditties about being “up to their knees in Fenian blood” have been banned.

Until very recently, there used to be an attitude among police and the footballing and that as long as it’s confined to the stadium, this sort of ugly triumphalism doesn’t do too much harm. That was misguided at best, dangerously negligent at worst.

In David Winner’s book about Dutch football, Brilliant Orange, one chapter deals with the Jewish identity of the country’s most famous club, Ajax. He reports how supporters of their biggest rivals, Feyenoord, have a particularly charming line in anti-Semitic insults: they hiss in unison and shout “Trains for Auschwitz leave in five minutes”.

“The abuse is widely viewed as a symptom of childish football tribalism than anti-Semitism, and has become so commonplace that police hardly ever bother to prosecute,” writes Winner. “Hadassa Hirschfield, deputy director of the Centre for Information and Documentation about Israel in The Hague, considers the trend ‘dangerous’ because it lessens the taboo against anti-Semitism.”

The taboo against sectarianism in Ibrox, similarly, seemed almost non-existent until UEFA started threatening Rangers with elimination from European competition if their supporters didn’t clean up their act. But at long last, they’re being forced to rack their brains and come up with alternatives to the bigotry that’s been coursing through Ibrox for decades.

Writing elsewhere about five years ago, I predicted that the pressures of football’s bid for world domination could lead to a scenario where Manchester United were put under pressure to move lock, stock and barrel to London. We’re not quite at that stage yet, but the bizarre notion of a 39th game in the English Premier League shows the same deep reservoir of contempt for the sport’s tradition and integrity.

I admit to a little schadenfreude as supporters of Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United wring their hands about the implications for their clubs’ future. They may revel in the skills of Adebayor, Torres and Ronaldo while Darren Mackie is testing my forebearance yet again, but at least when I go to Pittodrie I’m putting my money towards a football club – not a global marketing strategy.

There are three ways to deal with abuse from opposition fans: most players ignore it, a few stoke it up, but it’s only a tiny minority who confront it head on with good grace and humility.

Luca Toni is one such exception. At one point in last night’s Aberdeen-Bayern Munich UEFA Cup tie, a small object I couldn’t identify – although its erratic trajectory suggested it wasn’t a coin – flew past Toni from somewhere in the South Stand. Toni turned round, turned his palms upwards, cocked his head and furrowed his brow in disapproval. To which he was roundly jeered, and responded with the predictable cupping of the ear as he jogged back to the half-way line.

A short while later Toni fluffed a chance at the near post and the South Stand erupted in derisive laughter. In similar scenarios I’ve seen many a player respond with an ugly scowl, muttered profanities and a sly but obscene gesture. Toni, though, smiled good-naturedly, put out his hand straight out to the South Stand and made it waver up and down, left and right: “Not very good, am I?” he was asking with surprising irony and self-deprecation.

Toni’s response immediately defused the situation of any hostility. There were a few more smiles to come the way of the South Stand from the Italian striker, and any ribbing he got for the rest of the game was distinctly lacking in venom.

Compare the CIS Cup semi-final last week, when Dundee United keeper Lukasz Zaluska, for a full minute or so, celebrated a goal for his team by continually turning round to the Aberdeen supporters behind him, pumping a fist under his arm and hurling unintelligible abuse their way. I’d never seen a professional player respond in this way before – split-second outbursts, yes, but never have I a player carry on so aggressively for so long after the dust should have settled. (Incidentally, this in no way condones the morons who responded by flinging cups, coins and chocolate bars at him, but I saw nothing thrown his way before his bizarre and inflammatory outburst – contrary to some media reports).

Zaluska showed himself up as a low-life but I have new found respect for Toni, a man I’d dismissed as a diving prima donna at Hampden last November.