Black is best

Here’s something to be cheerful about. At an English Premiership football match last year, the fans of one London club were heard to be singing the following jolly refrain: ‘We all agree, our coons are better than your coons.’

We should be glad, because this little chanson marks what we might call a paradigm shift in the perceptions and expectations of a certain tranche of educationally subnormal white-trash football supporters.

Whereas, some years ago, black players were a rarity to be derided by not-that-small-a-minority of the crowd whenever they touched the ball, they are now happily prominent in pretty much every club throughout every league in England. The dribbling, shell-suited cretins, therefore, can’t pretend to themselves any more that black players are useless. And we have even got past the stage when some England fans would turn their backs on the game every time a black international player was in possession of the ball. Black players have possession of the ball all too often, these days, for that sort of stuff.

It is only 15 years ago, remember, that Everton fans were able to sing – to the stirring tune of ‘Cwm Rhondda’, since you ask – ‘We’re the whites of Merseyside’, provoked by their team’s strange (and, many argued, deliberate) refusal ever to sign a black player. They can’t sing it now, the Everton fans, although they still have fewer black players than most.

And it was round about this time that Ron Noades, then the chairman of Crystal Palace, pronounced, with consuming stupidity, that black players were fine as attackers, but were dilatory and inept at the stoical stuff of defending, especially when the weather was a bit inclement. Today, England’s centre-half pairing, and indeed the strongest component of the team, is Rio Ferdinand and Sol Campbell: both black and not noticeably inept, Ron, rain or shine.

It’s been a long and difficult march for the black footballers, whose pioneers from the 1960s through to the late 1980s suffered more racism and discrimination and outright hostility, both in public and in private, than any other sector of black British society.