Here are four things I know about at the end of this week.
Sam Allardyce is a bit of a tit.
Wayne Hennessy may not be the best goal-keeper at Palace.
Everton fans are not happy because that nice Roberto Martinez is a fallible manager.
Arsenal fans are not happy and would still find something to moan about if they won the double, the Champions League, the Eurovision Song Contest and the lottery.
There is a lot of anger about in football.
In some ways football exists as a means of venting your anger. Better to shout filth at a poor refereeing decision than shout filth at your boss, your wife or your teacher.
And of course football is adversarial. The nature of football means we always have someone else to vent our anger at – our local rivals, referees, commentators. This is something Sam Allardyce recognised last week. He is of course still a tit.
This last week has shown how often our anger is mis-placed and without the proper focus.
I am 47 now and began going to watch football when I was 6 or 7.
I remember two particular things about being a young kid going to football in those days. The first was that my dad used to lift me over the turnstile with a wink from the attendant, though that might have just been for reserve games. The second was that the youngest kids always got guided down to the front so that they could see. Your dad stood a few yards back – you knew he was there but he wasn’t right on your shoulder.
And there are two different views of those terraced days. On one hand, it was a golden era where tickets were cheap, there was that exhilaration when a goal was scored and there was that surge forward then back. It was a time of a community spirit where we looked after our own.
On the other hand, terraces were a health and safety nightmare, dangerous places populated by angry lunatics, which couldn’t be replaced because there was no money or interest in doing so.
If you look at images of some of the great terraced grounds, there were the most extraordinary number of people at games. Look at pictures of The Valley or Molineaux or Stamford Bridge. A mass of humanity.
Where everyone who went to the game left for home at its end.
At the time I was growing up, hooliganism was happening.
Hooliganism did not break out for the first time in 1977. When I researched the amazing 1971/72 season for a TEB article last September I was surprised to discover that Leeds had been forced to play several home games away from Elland Road because of their fans violent behaviour.
After a couple of years of following football, I knew that Leeds and Manchester United and West Ham and Chelsea and Millwall had fearsome reputations, and that twice a season so did Brighton and Palace.
But there were unwritten rules. If you wanted to keep out of trouble, you knew where to stand. The same rules about letting the young kids stand at the front still applied in those areas.
As fans we accepted that as the pragmatic thing to do, while the government and the police decided to introduce cages, fences and pens to try to contain violence inside grounds.
The introduction of those fences and barriers inside grounds was the moment that football fans should have collectively pushed back and stopped it happening.
Not pushing back meant there was an acceptance, tacit or otherwise, that football had a ‘problem’ and that football fans could be collectively classed as pariahs, whether they were dads taking their kids or thugs looking for the buzz of a fight at a game.
Football fans would always struggle to collectively oppose that appalling situation because fighting their own teams cause would always be more important.
What happened on 15 April 1989 was an inevitable consequence of the tacit acceptance of football fans being pariahs.
Putting huge numbers of people in cages or pens with no route to safety meant that the role of the police and the other emergency services was crucial, especially at games where the ground was full.
On that day the police and emergency services were not properly prepared or managed.
What happened after 15 April 1989 was also a consequence of the same tacit acceptance that football fans were fair game.
In the Observer the day after the Hillsborough the great Hugh McIlvaney pretty much set out what had happened.
In the Taylor report published in August, a High Court judge pretty much worked out what happened.
But because the perceived view that all football fans were potential thugs, ‘the truth’ was allowed to be ignored for 27 years.
There have been some remarkable articles this week showing the triumph of the human spirit among the families and supporters of the bereaved Liverpool fans.
There has also been remarkable Sam Allardyce comments about Palace players being “on the pop”. Alan Pardew’s response that these comments were pre-historic were spot on.
While we get angered by tits like Allardyce, as football fans we will put ourselves at risk of missing the bigger picture.
A quiz to finish. One of these statements is more important than the others:
Wayne Hennessy stood in the wrong place for that free kick and Jules might well have saved it.
Everton should have finished in the top six with that side.
Arsenal will come fourth this year, next year and for years to come.
Sam Allardyce is still a tit.
96 people should never ever have died that day and been stigmatised for 27 years after.
