It’s a very odd experience to have complete strangers coming up to you and saying “you guys did brilliantly today”, when all you’ve been doing for the last two hours is watching a football match.
This happened at Loftus Road on Boxing Day. At the end of the game, Ipswich fans who I’d never met were coming up to me and my partner, congratulating us on how we’d conducted ourselves during the game, and telling us that we should complain to QPR about what we’d experienced. The reason for this is that we’d been on the receiving end of abuse from a group of home fans for most of the game, and the portions that had been directed towards my partner had been horrendously misogynist.
We were sitting at the front of the upper tier of the away end, very near the home fans in the Ellerslie Road stand. Other than proximity, I’m not really sure why we were singled out. Actually, I do know. It was because one of us happened to be female.
It’s really not OK for a large group of people to identify an individual in a football ground, point at them, and sing “she’s got chlamydia” at her. That wasn’t even the worst of it, either.
It’s also worth noting that this was completely unprovoked. Some away fans like to wind up the home fans, but we just go to away matches to watch our team. Neither my partner or I had said or gestured anything towards the QPR fans at any point during the game. Not that it would have made such abuse OK if we had done, but the fact that it came from nothing makes it particularly startling.
Fortunately our children weren’t with us that day. I don’t know how we’d have explained it to them if they had been. There was a young child sitting next to us during the first half, with his dad, who didn’t reappear for the second. Given what they’d heard, I’m not surprised.
This isn’t about having a go at QPR. I’ve visited Loftus Road many times, and always enjoyed it. I’ve seen Ipswich there more times than I can count. A couple of years ago, it was the first ground that my partner’s daughter visited as an away fan. Last September, I sat in the same block that the abuse was coming from on Boxing Day, and watched the Game For Grenfell. It’s a properly atmospheric football ground, situated at the heart of a community.
Some of QPR’s supporters acted like dickheads on Saturday, but on another day it would have been another team’s fans. Including, quite possibly, Ipswich. (The misogynist song that some Ipswich fans sing about Delia Smith seems to have undergone a depressing renaissance this season). This isn’t about any particular team. It’s about the fact that a large-ish group of almost overwhelmingly male football supporters thought it was OK to direct nasty, personal, sexist abuse, purely for their own entertainment, at someone whose only act of provocation had been to be female within a few yards of them.
Nobody in that section of the ground challenged them. Nobody else even looked uncomfortable. No stewards sought to intervene – although, to be fair, what could they have done? I didn’t report it at the time because I didn’t see what good could come of it. They weren’t going to eject a whole section of supporters: all that would have happened was that the abuse would have got worse. I’ve written to QPR about it, and if I get a response I’ll post it here.
Sexism is not OK. Personal abuse is not OK. Identifying someone as female and immediately defining them by their gender and sexuality is not OK. Chanting nasty things about someone’s sexual health is not OK. Football grounds, on the whole, are much more welcoming and inclusive places than they used to be, thanks to years of campaigning and hard work, but there seems to be a worrying counter-trend for some people to think that it’s somehow OK to say absolutely anything to anyone. It’s like the bottom half of the internet rendered in human form: those keyboard warriors who lurk behind avatars in the basest, most pathetic corners of Twitter given real-life legitimacy by a group mentality which has unilaterally declared that “free speech” means the freedom to be abusive without consequence.
We’ve come a long way in football over the years, but we’ve still got such a very, very long way to go.
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