Pitch Black (19 page)

As it transpired, England’s hosting of Euro 1996 was never under serious threat. The England squad, now featuring Paul Ince, then of Inter Milan, Les Ferdinand of Newcastle United
and Sol Campbell of Tottenham, were the host nation of a major football tournament for the first time since the World Cup of 1966. Both Holland and France featured more black players within their squads than England, although of the three, Ince was the only one to feature regularly in the side, playing in four out of England’s five games. The flag of St George replaced the Union Jack as the flag of choice for England fans, and its presence at the tournament seemed to be divorced from its previous far-right associations. England were finally knocked out of the tournament at the semi-final stage by eventual winners Germany, but with the tournament on home soil and the nasty, vindictive, overly patriotic siege mentality of England’s support largely absent, serious disturbances didn’t materialise, although there was a ripple of violence and anti-German sentiment after England’s elimination, fuelled in no small part by anti-German jingoism by a large section of the tabloid press.

John Barnes, his pace dulled by injury but his football brain still intact, had successfully reinvented himself as a central midfielder. No longer able to play as an out-and-out winger, his relocation to a central midfield role had given his career new purpose. He had been made captain of Liverpool and, as an old head in a youthful but talented side, he was able to dictate the tempo of the play, keep the ball moving and be available to take possession. As a winger, his pace and dribbling ability had caught the eye, but his passing range had gone somewhat unappreciated. Now, with his ability to glide past defenders at will no longer available to him, his range of passing took centre stage and in April, at the back end of the
1995/96 season, he was able to demonstrate how successfully he had made the transition. In an epic game at Anfield, Liverpool had raced into an early lead against title-chasing Newcastle, so keeping alive their own slim chances of winning the Premier League title. Newcastle themselves bounced back to take a 2–1 lead after only fourteen minutes and that remained the score at the end of the first half. After half-time, Liverpool drew level, which was to last for only two minutes, after which United took a 3–2 lead. Stan Collymore got yet another for Liverpool on seventy minutes and, as the game became stretched, it ebbed and flowed from one end to another as each side looked for the goal that would maintain their bid for the title. With the game deep in stoppage time, Liverpool launched one last frenetic attack. A series of quick passes, with Barnes in the thick of things, brought Liverpool to the edge of the Newcastle box. As the ball pinged around the area, it fell to Barnes. Amid the mayhem, and surrounded by Newcastle players, he seemed to have all the time in the world as he picked out Collymore, unmarked and in acres of space, who ruthlessly dispatched the ball into the net to end Newcastle’s hopes of the title and keep Liverpool’s slim chances of glory alive.

Barnes’s journey from winger to midfield creator had been a long one from the days when black footballers were considered unfit for the responsibility of playing as a team’s creative hub. In later years, players like Tom Huddlestone would carry on the baton first picked up by the likes of Barnes and Arsenal’s Paul Davis. This playmaker position required an appreciation of time and space, distance and angles, technical ability, vision and ability to read the game. This blend of technical and cerebral qualities was successfully negotiated by Barnes towards the end of his career and, after his time at Anfield
ended, he went on to perform reasonably well with Newcastle and Charlton. With the quality he had, his high profile and undoubted ability to analyse the game, surely a career in management at a big club awaited him. He would get his chance.

Three months into 1997 – ironically, the European Union’s Year Against Racism – Wales striker Nathan Blake vowed never to play for Wales again while manager Bobby Gould was in charge. The incident in question took place as Wales prepared for their World Cup qualifier against Belgium in March 1997. Initially, Blake’s withdrawal from the squad was passed off as ‘sickness or diarrhoea’, but as news of the circumstances surrounding his withdrawal became public, Gould stated in a radio interview:

Blake had stated that Gould had once racially insulted him during his time as a youth player and also brought up details of a team talk that Gould had given the previous October, in a home game in which Wales had been beaten 3–1 by Holland. Blake alleged that Dutch striker Pierre van Hooijdonk had been described as a ‘black bastard’ by Gould. In response, Gould stated:

Gould had managed the Crazy Gang during his period as manager of Wimbledon and used this experience to illustrate the somewhat hackneyed defence of his record in managing black players.

While admitting he wasn’t fully aware of the circumstances surrounding the incident, Ken Tucker, chairman of the Association of Wales committee, was quick to rush to Gould’s defence and stated, ‘I do know Bobby Gould very well and would not have thought there was any question of racism in his behaviour … He is just not that type of man and I am very surprised at this allegation.’ In his knee-jerk response,
Tucker’s comments echoed the lack of understanding and poor leadership in keeping with the game’s hierarchy in England and Scotland.

In the aftermath of the incident, Blake revealed he’d received an anonymous package at his club, Blackburn Rovers:

Blake was to resume his international career after Gould resigned following Wales’s failure to qualify for the 1998 World Cup. His stand would have been difficult to imagine even a few years previously and would have been the stuff of fantasy when Regis, Batson, Crooks, Anderson et al. were in their prime. Blake’s action was significant in another way, too. Anti-racist campaigns had focused on terrace behaviour and the activities of the far right. Blake’s withdrawal from the national squad shifted the agenda in another direction. There had always been an unwritten rule that what happened in the dressing room stayed in the dressing room. By exposing the hitherto unseen world of the dressing room and training pitch, Blake had broken one of football’s taboos and in doing so shifted the focus of anti-racism towards some of
the ingrained attitudes that existed amongst those within the game’s leadership.

After Blake had taken his stance, James Hussaney was to win a case at an industrial tribunal for race discrimination, the first involving an English club. Hussaney was a trainee at Chester City, and in January 1997, prior to a reserve team game against Oldham Athletic, he had put the wrong size studs into his manager Kevin Ratcliffe’s boots, to which Ratcliffe, former captain of both Everton and Wales, responded by calling him a ‘black cunt’. Hussaney made a formal complaint to the club. The club chairman, Mark Guterman, told Hussaney and his mother not to take the matter any further, warning that ‘no other club would touch [him] with a barge pole’. In the spring of 1997, Hussaney was informed he would not be receiving a professional contract. Ratcliffe stated that ‘he had neither the technical ability nor mental strength to be kept on’, so confirming Guterman’s statement that he would be leaving the club. Despite this, the tribunal found that Hussaney’s dismissal was on purely footballing grounds, but did find Ratcliffe was guilty of racist abuse and awarded Hussaney £2,500 in compensation.

This could have been the catalyst for the FA to actively demonstrate its new-found commitment to anti-racism by holding some form of inquiry or investigation, in keeping with its zero-tolerance policy towards racism. It stated it would hold an inquiry but never did and instead left Chester to deal with the issue as an internal matter. Ratcliffe was to remain manager until 1999.

In February 1998, Aston Villa’s Stan Collymore claimed that former teammate Steve Harkness had racially abused him.

Collymore had informed the referee at the time Harkness was alleged to have made the remark. Despite making noises about holding an inquiry, the FA never took action, leaving Collymore frustrated and Harkness, who denied the remark, without an opportunity to put forward his own case.

The FA’s duplicitous, two-pronged strategy of ignoring racism when specific allegations were made but publicly advocating zero tolerance was perfectly illustrated when, barely a month after the Collymore–Harkness incident, they enthusiastically supported the first report from the newly elected Labour government’s ‘Football Task Force’, which released ‘Eliminating Racism from Football’ in March 1998. The taskforce included key stakeholders within football and wider sport and government. The FA, Premier League, Football League, PFA, League Managers Association, Premier and Football League Match officials, the FSA, Sport England, Commission for Racial Equality and a variety of other bodies and individuals formed the ‘taskforce’. The report was the most far-reaching and ambitious report into racism in European sport. It asked a number of key questions on topics such as Asian participation in playing and spectating; the diminishing number of black spectators; lack of black and Asian administrators, coaches and referees; and lack of representation on the FA council. The report
advocated that the FA should introduce guidelines to make racist abuse a red-card offence. It also recommended that the Football Offences Act be amended to make individual racist abuse by spectators a criminal offence, and it made a number of recommendations about tackling racism in grassroots football and in supporting anti-racist campaigns. Overall, the report acknowledged that the game had serious problems at all levels and in 2001 the law was amended to make racist chanting or abuse by one individual a criminal offence.

Terrace abuse of the kind that was common in the 1970s and ’80s was becoming rarer, slowly being replaced by other forms of racism. The kind of chanting that had occurred for the full ninety minutes and been accompanied by banana throwing was disappearing from the English game. Racist chanting at black players could still be heard but was undertaken by smaller sections of fans. It was often directed at footballers who were of Asian, north African or other heritage as the league became more ethnically varied. Chanting directed at opposing fans in order to denigrate their town or region was also common. In February 1998, Leeds fans taunted their Leicester City counterparts with chants of ‘Town full of Pakis’ and Coventry’s Moroccan international midfielder Youssef Chippo was racially abused by Newcastle United fans in October 1999.

The increasingly cosmopolitan and diverse nature of the Premier League meant that teams without black players were very much the exception. Everton had signed Nigerian Daniel Amokachi from Belgian Club Brugge in 1994, making him the first black player to play for the club since Cliff Marshall in 1976. In the intervening years, racist chanting had been witnessed on a regular basis at Goodison Park and had been
elevated since the arrival of Barnes at Liverpool. As the side’s fortunes on the pitch deteriorated, their reputation as a racist club increased and they began to gain national notoriety for the behaviour of their fans and their seeming reluctance to sign black players. Everton’s most successful manager, Howard Kendall, had returned for a second spell in 1990 and under his management, the club went through the strange practice of expressing interest in seemingly every available black player, yet in each case refusing to pay what the club deemed to be too high a transfer fee. Kendall finally resigned in December 1993, after agreeing a fee with Manchester United for Dion Dublin only for a board member to block the deal at the eleventh hour. This apparent refusal to sign a black player, along with a vocal minority of racist support, gave the club a reputation as being amongst the most racist clubs in British football.