Bored of the Campbell
Everyone seems to have an opinion on the Sol Campbell abuse. Refs, The FA, Rio Ferdinand, the police, Peter Tatchell, Brian Reade's rant and the rest of the knee-jerking media hacks. And David Mellor, who thinks the return game at WHL should be played behind closed doors. Yeah, great idea David. Let's punish the majority for what a few hundred fans sang. Maybe we can retrospectively punish your beloved Chelsea and have them play their next 100 games behind closed doors for decades of hissing and Auschwitz songs?
Munich, Harold Shipman, Ashley Cole and mobile phones - you could spend a day listing chants that could be categorised as abusive (to the targeted individual or a group of people). But the media, police and the players who get the brunt of it shrug, count their thousands upon thousands of notes sitting in their bank accounts and the following week run out onto the pitch and do it again.
For the 1000th time, I'm not defending the song that was sang for Campbell's benefit. That same song that's been sang for a few years now without ever making the backpages. And I'm not defending Campbell, who is obviously feeling a little fragile and feels the need to once more play the victim. Has Arsene Wenger ever made any complaints about the songs aimed at him by a number of fans from different clubs? No. Because he knows the people that sang them are football fans.
What makes all of this coverage even more ridiculous, is the media who, lets face it - are a joke. Made up of Man Utd fans (don't roll your eyes), they practically called all Man City fans as scum for singing Munich songs, using their back-pages as a tool of control stating that if anyone chanted that song at the 50th Munich Commemoration when City visited Old Trafford, they would be hung, drawn and quartered - banned for life. Nothing mentioned about the fact that City are proactive and ban anyone at Eastlands for singing it. And not a whisper of the Hillsborough, Heysel and Leeds (fans killed in Turkey) songs Utd fans sing every week.
Hypocrisy at its English finest.
Cast your minds back to last year when Spurs played Utd at OT. The Utd fans (a minority of them, right?) started hissing. We've heard that before of course. Nothing new. But the day they choose to do so was on International Holocaust Memorial Day. That kind of pales Sol Campbell's crying into insignificance, but God forbid anyone writes about that.
