My campaign for fairer treatment

I am a football fan. Each fortnight I go to watch my club and, like the overwhelming majority of the football–supporting community, I do so peaceably, giving offence or threat to nobody. Sometimes I take boiled sweets. At halftime I might enjoy a chicken balti pie and a glass of lager. I do not lamp opposing supporters over the head with a bottle, or chase them around the back streets of the local area screaming: ‘I’m going to open you up like a can of peaches.’ Only a tiny minority of the football-supporting community do things like that, and so I am disinclined to consider them football supporters at all. I am aware, of course, that they are football supporters and that their motivation for the violence they wreak devolves directly from the game of football, by way of a fundamental antipathy to people who support a different team, especially Crystal Palace. It may be that I too possess some of that antipathy, but I do not act upon it. I keep it to myself and, of course, abhor the violence that takes place.

We are a vulnerable community, much maligned, despite the fact 99 per cent of us are blameless individuals who wish simply to spend a Saturday afternoon shouting ‘You fat bastard’ at, say, Steve Bruce. And yet the media persists in linking us with that tiny minority, the ones who make the news through their discourtesy to opposing fans. I have compiled a study of 10,000 incidences of violence taking place as a consequence of football matches and have found that, without exception, the press and broadcast media refers to these assaults as ‘football related’, using terms such as ‘football hooligans’ and ‘Millwall-supporting thugs’. Further, when photographs are shown of the perpetrators of these degenerate acts, they are invariably displayed in a football setting, perhaps cheering from the stands or making their way to the ground or wearing their team’s colours.