Chelsea Football Club. Hot favourites to win the Premier League, League Cup finalists and in a strong Champions League position after an excellent result in Paris last night. And what an excellent result that was in Paris, a 1-1 draw against one of the strongest teams in Europe. But it’s not making the news today. The actions of a handful of idiots are making the news. Racist idiots.
“We’re racist, we’re racist and that’s the way we like it,” was the ‘hilarious’ chant from four or five clowns on the French metro as the repeatedly shoved a black man back off the train as he bravely tried to board it. Quite what made them react in this way, goodness only knows. From their accents, I am guessing they were from London so it is hard to believe they were in any way surprised to see someone who was black. None of them could be heard saying, “There’s a chap trying to board the train who has different colour skin to me, except when I’m just back from Spain, obviously. I’ve never seen that in London. Let’s enforce an apartheid system here on this French tube train. You know it makes sense, especially after 15 pints of lager.”
And we like being racist? What, like Hitler was racist, or maybe the way South Africa was? Rather than being an open, tolerant, meritocratic society, let’s divide ourselves up into different colours. Oh, for god’s sake.
But this is what has happened after the events on the Metro. Never mind the triumph of Jose Mourinho’s team, many of whom are, believe it or not, black (apparently something like half of all players at Chelsea are black, so we’d better be racist towards them too, especially that Drogba. I mean, he’s from Africa). But someone on the radio this morning suggested that these men were drunk, which somehow made it all right. They didn’t really mean it but they’d had a shed load of drink and weren’t in control of their faculties. They’ve probably slept it off and forgotten all about it by now. What utter tosh. Rank intoxication usually means people speak with rare honesty as their inhibitions come tumbling down.
The handful of idiots, who overshadowed the vast majority of genuine Chelsea fans who behaved impeccably, will get their comeuppance because they were filmed by a Brit ex-pat who was appalled by their behaviour. Whether they have committed a crime is a matter for the French police, I would imagine, but sooner or later they will be identified and ridiculed and, probably, banned from football and maybe banned from travelling.
Ignorant racist dickheads probably sums them up, ignorant racist pissed up dickheads. It was genuinely shocking because, before the advent of mobile phones that can actually film stuff, you just heard about these things.
I hope they have the decency to apologise to the man they were preventing from boarding his train in his own country. They’ve let their club down, they’ve let their country down but most of all they’ve let themselves down.
