Sometimes it seems that football
has changed beyond recognition. The game has become gentrified, the property of Sunday
broadsheet pages; the support of a team is de rigeur for anyone who has serious
pretensions towards being seen as middle class; football strides mightily across the
schedules of tv stations, pushing anything as mundane as normal tv programmes out of the
way. Football is here. Football is huge. And, above all, football is safe, sanitised and
respectable.
Of course that isn’t true, and we have lots of
reasons to feel thankful for it. In any case, anyone who wants to think of football as a
middle class game only has to meet the police. You see, middle class people have rights in
the face of the law. Football supporters have none.
It’s still true after all these years. All
thoughts of civil liberties are thrown out of the window when, as a football fan, you
encounter a member of the police force who knows that you’re a football fan.
If we needed any proof, we got it again on our way back
to London from our recent game at Preston. Of course we’d been drinking. So yes, I
suspect we were a little noisy. There we sat on the train eating smelly kebabs and talking
about the day’s game. Perhaps that makes us sound like the sort of people you’d
want to avoid. But consider what we were not doing. We weren’t smashing the place up.
We weren’t threatening anybody. We weren’t throwing things around, or chanting
songs, or even using excessively bad language. Quite right, you might think, the very
least you'd expect. Yet I’ve been on trains when all these things and more have been
happening.
Sometimes the people doing it happen to be on the way
back from a football match. Sometimes they’re not.
This is what happened next: one of us told a young
child off for throwing things over the back of the seat, onto his seat. The child’s
mother immediately reared up, told us we had gone to far and called down the ‘Senior
Conductor’. Suddenly we were the centre of attention. The Conductor, a young and
inexperienced lad of the type that Virgin trains chooses to employ, immediately accused us
of all manner of misdeeds. We were now officially drunk and out of order.
All very well and the cause of some debate, until the
train reached Milton Keynes and the police climbed on board. I happened to be up by the
buffet waving off a friend. The steward was quick to point us yobs out to the law.
"It’s these three here and those four down there causing the trouble," he
said. I asked the officer what we were supposed to have done. He shot me a look. A woman
had made allegations, he replied.
A woman had alleged that a man had hit her child. A
serious business, except that it didn’t happen, and the best efforts of the conductor
to find someone else in the carriage to back her story up had failed. But even so, a
disagreement between two individuals had suddenly led to our whole group being
accused… of something. What were we being accused of? I asked the officer. "I
can get you on any number of things," he replied.
A disagreement between two people on a train had now
led to a group of associated people being given instructions by the police to sit down,
stay quiet and refrain from drinking. And the information followed that more police would
be there to meet us at Euston.
The people in the train carriage who had joined after
the alleged incident couldn’t understand what was going on. Seeing the police warning
us on our behaviour, they would only have concluded that we must have done something
wrong. Yet as far as I'm aware, talking about football in a loud voice, while possibly
boring, isn't yet a crime.
I felt sorry for anyone in the carriage who may have
found a few men having a loud conversation about the game too much to handle. They were
bound for London. I worried about them, and how they might cope if they had to take a tube
or catch a bus when we arrived at chucking out time, which would certainly be more
aggressive, noisier and less regulated than anything they might find on the train.
It was fascinating to think that police had been taken
off the streets of Milton Keynes just to give the stern talk to a group of slightly drunk,
slightly noisy, slightly tired blokes on their way home.
The saddest thing about this story is that it is
completely unremarkable. If you want to walk around the streets unhindered and mind your
own business, don’t be a football fan. Civil liberties do not exist. The police hold
all the cards and will do what they want. Anyone who has ever questioned why they need to
be searched on entering a football ground knows this. Anyone who ever travels regularly to
watch games doesn’t need to be told that it is still like this.
Being a football fan confronted by the law, you
suddenly see how easy it would be to end up in trouble for doing nothing. You know they
hold the cards. So you swallow your pride and keep quiet. The police know it too. They
win. So they keep on doing it. The funniest thing is that it is exactly those middle-class
broadsheet-reading liberals who would normally be the first to leap to the defence of
someone’s civil liberties who are happiest to see the police stampede over ours.
Being a football fan cuts across everything else.
Don’t ever believe them when they tell you this
game of ours has changed for good. In lots of ways, it’s still the bad old days.
