Banning Tottenham supporters for abusive chanting is a waste of time

Abuse victim: Emmanuel Adebayor was singled out by some of Arsenal's supporters at White Hart Lane (GETTY IMAGES)

I am not condoning the horrible chants from Tottenham and Arsenal supporters during Sunday’s North London derby. Having to write that feels like an insult to our collective intelligence. No-one much likes torture, tragic deaths or Hitler, either. We are rarely forced to clarify those positions.

Of course it’s horrible for Arsène Wenger to be ludicrously, baselessly called a paedophile. Of course it’s inhuman to mock Emmanuel Adebayor for being the victim of a terrorist gun attack in Angola. But did small pockets of supporters singing songs about these things really overshadow Sunday’s game, as has been mooted?

There has been much easy use of the word “overshadowed” in coverage of the chanting, which feels like lip service to imagined offence caused. Of course, football as an abstract whole cannot be seen to tolerate such behaviour and it’s no surprise to read Harry Redknapp saying: "It was disgusting, yeah, disgusting.

“How do you chant something like that to someone? You can't be right mentally. You need help. There are kids up there as well. It's got no place anywhere in life, that sort of stuff."

That sort of everyman moralising from Redknapp will strike a chord with those swathes of the population that become outraged at the merest provocation.

Personally I resent that apparently agreed league table of “sickness” which makes one kind of cruelty fine and another “disgusting”. Many of us share an unspoken understanding of what constitutes “acceptable” abuse at a football match, but trying to enforce that line collectively, or chastising those that cross it, is extremely problematic.

The concept of abusive chanting is nebulous in itself. We will rightly stand behind the idea that racist abuse is out of order. But it’s apparently fine to tell Cardiff supporters that they enjoy congress with sheep. Homophobia is correctly frowned upon, but most wouldn’t bat an eyelid at a player exaggerating injury being slandered with a gay pejorative from the stands.

This unclear collective moral compass touches lots of crowd behaviour at football, and is riddled with inconsistencies. Home supporters will cheer when a visiting player pulls up in pain and hobbles off. They’ll applaud if he’s taken off on a stretcher. Who knows which of these injuries will prove most serious in the long run?

It’s extremely difficult to change this ingrained group behaviour but it does happen. When it does, the change in attitude usually comes from within, not as a result of condemnations from clubs or managers. When I started watching QPR in the early 90s I remember a man a few rows behind me spewing racist abuse at John Fashanu, unencumbered by stewards.

A few years ago a different bloke shouted something vile at a different black player. Before he’d even had chance to finish several people around him shouted at him to shut up.

Those incidents did not happen at particularly intense games, unlike Sunday’s at White Hart Lane. The beloved media narrative for any game like Spurs v Arsenal is all about bad blood, a heated rivalry, a lack of love lost. How can that coexist with impeccable behaviour from each side’s supporters?

We want that edge, that excitement. Football is not clean, genteel and sophisticated, and this is part of the attraction for many of its followers. Such shallow condemnation of abusive chanting achieves little and represents the thrust of sanitisation creeping into the Premier League product.

Demonising supporters, dismissing them with that patronising epithet “so-called fans” betrays a wilful ignorance of what football support is about. The uncomfortable and generally unmentioned truth is that those undesirably fervent supporters who sing horrible songs are often the backbone of a club, certainly they constitute a large part of any team’s travelling support.

There will always, always, be people that misbehave in heated situations. Spurs’ policy of “taking out one or two of the ring-leaders who are initiating the chants," sounds sensible, but why are the people that start the chants worse than those that join in?

The evidence is hardly watertight, either, as demonstrated by Ian Trow’s quashed conviction for chanting at Portsmouth in 2008.

Until Sky has HD cameras trained on each block of a ground, how can you expect to identify those that are guilty of singing a significantly abusive song? How much of it do you have to sing to be guilty?

I’ve never heard the majority of a stadium singing one of these top-tier offensive chants in 20 years of going to football. It’s very small pockets of support, and banning the perpetrators achieves nothing.

Everton fans still throw coins at Luis Suarez, nutters still send Neil Lennon letter bombs. There will always be new idiots ready to take up the mantle. But attitudes change. Eventually the sane will outnumber the fools and collectively shout them down.

In the meantime, when it comes abusing opponents there will be some who go over the top, because there will always be people in society that are not self-aware enough to realise how ridiculous they are. And people who just aren’t very nice.

Tokenistic banning of a few of these will not change that fact.