BEHAVING BADLY
Whatever we choose to call it, the yob thing is back. Football fans from Watford and Luton have been brawling on the pitch. Earlier in the season, there was trouble at Millwall, traditionally a mecca for psychos and hard men. The Cardiff boys, a lower species of pond life when it comes to hooliganism, have been on the march again.
There has also been some seriously bad behaviour among the footballers themselves. I suppose that the sensible, grown-up approach to all this is to express the weary regret and distaste that is spreading like a chilly fog through the usual quarters. "I hate football so much these days that I can hardly bear to report it," reads the headline over a piece by Michael Henderson in this week's Spectator. Writing with genuine disgust, Henderson refers to the "foulness of football", its greed and violence, the oafishness with which fans express support of their own team and their hatred of others, its pampered, moneyed and amoral stars - in short, the game's "capacity for finding all that is most base and vile in people, and bringing it to the surface".
No one in his right mind could defend the racism, thuggishness and violence of football's more neanderthal fans. Obviously any player who regards nose-breaking elbow-work as a modern footballing skill or who dives in, stud first, at knee-height with a view to breaking another player's leg, deserves to be suspended, heavily fined and told in no uncertain manner that he has been over-competitive.
On the other hand, faced with two different kinds of sport: that of Roy Keane - hot-blooded, committed, ferociously over-the-top - and that of the man in the Spectator - deft, skilful, played with old-fashioned decency and Corinthian spirit - I know which I would prefer. The point about great competitive sport is that it not only enacts courage, physical prowess, fitness, team spirit and all that is best in the human physique and spirit, but also its darker, less attractive, nasty, niggling, cheating side.
I like that. For me, it is precisely because soccer combines so many moral complexities and opportunities to do good and bad that it so compelling and cathartic to watch. Expecting it to be civilised is like wanting sex to be decent. If the Bowyers and Keanes often fall short as acceptable role models for the children who watch them, then that is probably true of uncompromising winners in other walks of life, like business, politics or the media.