Authors: Emy Onuora
I said, ‘I beg your pardon’, and I was told, ‘You’re a nigger, you’re a spade, off you go over there.’ I said, ‘I’m not being funny but do you know what my name is? My name’s Richie Moran, if you want to speak to me, you’ll call me the same respect [
sic
] you would to any other human being. If you call me anything racially derogatory, I’m actually going to tear your head off, right here, right now, in front of everybody,’ and it was at that stage I thought, ‘I actually don’t want to play this game anymore’ – not because I couldn’t take it, but because I didn’t have to.
Two black players, Paul Hall and Darren Moore, who were young trainees at Torquay at the time and would later go on to play in the Premier League with Portsmouth and win
international honours with Jamaica, both offered support for Moran, but were young players at the beginning of their careers and expressing their support explicitly might have impacted upon their careers.
Throughout his time at Birmingham, Moran got on well with the most of his fellow professionals. However, he did fall out with one player who had head-butted a nineteen-year-old reserve team goalkeeper at a Christmas party, breaking his nose in the process. Moran liked Birmingham, then as now an ethnically diverse city, and got on well with the club’s supporters, even though one Birmingham City fanzine voted Moran as their worst ever player – a harsh judgement given some of the awful players who have pulled on the blue jersey. It was the treatment and attitude of managers and coaches, those who wielded power and influence and who had petty egos and backward attitudes – and the culture within the game that found their behaviour acceptable – that caused him to stop playing professional football.
Unlike the majority of professional footballers, Moran was never signed to a club on schoolboy terms, never progressed through the youth system as an apprentice or trainee and never learned as a young professional the art of understanding and negotiating the politics of the dressing room, the training pitch and the racist attitudes of coaches and fellow professionals. Players who came through the non-league route, such as Cyrille Regis, Ian Wright or Les Ferdinand, also tended to come into the professional game at a young age and had time to gain something of an education in dealing with racist attitudes. Moran himself had suffered abuse while playing non-league football. At Waterlooville, an opposition player had given him a torrent of racist abuse
during a match. After the game, Moran went into the opposition changing room, grabbed him by the throat and invited him to come outside and repeat the abuse to his face. Even the other opposition players told Moran that their teammate deserved a smack. Therefore, he was never schooled from a very early age in football’s culture, where building a career as a black professional footballer came at a price to personal dignity. His maturity, along with the fact that he did well academically, gave Moran an entirely different perspective on what he was prepared to accept in his place of work and provided him with other options outside professional football.
Briefly, Moran drifted back into non-league football before becoming, amongst other things, a travel writer and an active campaigner for anti-racism in football. He was invited by a police officer to be a guest speaker at an event during the 1999/2000 season at Watford Football Club, attended by a former England manager who would provide Moran with an insight into the attitudes of senior FA officials towards black players.
Graham Taylor come up to me … and said, ‘Look, I’m going to tell you something … I’m never going to admit it, I will be sued for libel.’ He said, ‘When I was manager of England I was called in by two members of the FA, who I won’t name…’ I volunteered two names. He said, ‘I’m not prepared to say, but I was told in no uncertain terms not to pick too many black players for the national side.’
Moran’s revelation reveals that the FA’s primary concern was to preserve a predominantly white image of the England team, an image that they themselves had constructed
and took great steps to preserve. Taylor was appointed England manager immediately after the World Cup of 1990 and lost his job three years later, as England failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup. There is no question of Taylor having acted on those instructions, but the episode raises some important questions as to how many other England managers were given the same instructions and therefore felt pressurised to limit the numbers of black players selected to play for the national side. During his playing career, Paul Davis had wondered whether some kind of unofficial quota system was in operation, but had never considered it beyond mere speculation. It would raise the question of how many black players had had their chances of playing for England restricted and what impact this might have had on England’s fortunes.
The inner-city disturbances that had occurred in the early part of the 1980s, and the Scarman Report that came in their wake, had highlighted the issue of the policing of black communities as a major cause of the disorder. Alongside this, the issue of racial discrimination in employment was also highlighted as one of the underlying causes of the resentment felt by black communities. Whereas previous disturbances in Nottingham and Notting Hill in the 1950s and at the Notting Hill Carnival in 1976 had been carried out by black people who were overwhelmingly born outside the UK, the significance of the disturbances in the early and mid-1980s was that the anger and resentment came from young black people who had been born in the UK. Issues of language, integration, education and familiarity did not readily apply to the same degree as in previous disturbances and therefore the issue of racial discrimination as an explanation for unequal patterns of employment and unemployment could not be so readily
dismissed. As a result, many progressive local councils, particularly those in large urban areas with significant proportions of black and Asian communities, began to actively develop equality policies in line with the provisions of the Race Relations Act, which had been introduced in 1976. The legislation outlawed racial discrimination in employment and in the provision of goods and services and required councils and other public bodies to monitor these provisions. With public bodies actively embracing equality policies and also under increased scrutiny by black community organisations, a proportion of people from minority ethnic communities began to gain employment opportunities within organisations that had hitherto been denied them, and a smaller number were appointed to middle and senior management positions. These developments ushered in a new, albeit small, black middle class, employed almost exclusively within the public sector. However, these developments would not be allowed to go unchecked and, as is usual, there developed a backlash against providing opportunities for equality of employment for racial minorities. The most inflammatory opposition was led by the tabloid press, but their counterparts in some broadsheets were hardly more restrained in their dismissal of equality policies as an example of the wastefulness of so-called loony left local councils. The discourse around the implementation of equality policies illustrated the thinly veiled contempt in which issues of racism and discrimination were held, and while it was true that Labour-controlled councils adopted equality policies and strategies with most enthusiasm, most councils, irrespective of their political outlook, began to embrace equality policies to some degree by the end of the 1980s.
The development and implementation of these policies produced something of a contradictory assessment of their worth
on the part of black people. While, collectively, black activists campaigned for the adoption of more comprehensive policies, the backlash against equality campaigns, led by the media and supported by large numbers of Conservative and some Labour politicians, had impacted on the willingness of black individuals to participate in anti-racist campaigns. Before deciding whether to give active support to such campaigns, a number of key considerations had to be made. Will I be the only person to support or ‘front’ the campaign? Shouldn’t white employees be involved? Is the campaign tokenistic? Is my involvement reduced to promotion of the campaign rather than shaping the nature of the campaign itself? Will I be perceived as being militant? Will supporting the campaign be seen as legitimising my employer? Will I leave myself isolated? Will my white colleagues ostracise me? Will there be some kind of backlash? These were the kinds of questions that many black people in the workplace would ask themselves when considering involving themselves in anti-racist campaigns, and, inevitably, within the highly conservative, slow-changing environment of football there was a great deal of unwillingness on the part of black footballers to participate in the early campaigns against racism. Overseas players, both black and white, had no such cultural baggage to influence their decision. To them it was an anti-racist campaign; they were against racism, so they took part, often with a great deal of enthusiasm. Shaka Hislop of Newcastle United and Lucas Radebe of Leeds United were pioneers in their support for the early development of anti-racist campaigns. It took some time before home-grown black players began to embrace these movements with the same degree of whole-heartedness. However, as 1995 began, one event saw black players become more vocal and active in their support for anti-racist initiatives.
With a history of falling out with the authorities and coaches in his native France, Eric Cantona was widely considered a gifted, maverick talent who had been the catalyst for the resurgence of his club. His disciplinary record had been poor and he was regarded as a player who could easily be provoked. After a series of niggly challenges from Richard Shaw, he lashed out at and was shown a red card.
His ‘kung-fu’ kick on Matthew Simmons after being subjected to anti-French abuse by the Crystal Palace supporter at a hostile Selhurst Park in January 1995 earned Cantona a lengthy ban. In the immediate aftermath of the game, attention had focused upon Cantona’s unprecedented and seemingly unprovoked attack on a spectator. As information began to emerge that Cantona had been subject to provocation, the tide began to turn and the incident finally made the authorities wake up. Cantona’s response to Simmons’s xenophobic rant highlighted, in a small way, the kind of treatment black players had been forced to endure for years.
For many black footballers, there was secret admiration for Cantona’s action. Most had experienced his frustration and anger, but had been rendered impotent by their inability to respond with anything other than the ‘head-down-get-on-with-the-game’ approach. Most black footballers had, at one time or other, wanted to take the type of action that Cantona did. Some had even come close and, in one or two cases, like that of George Berry, had even strayed into the kind of territory that Cantona’s abuser had provoked, but Cantona’s action was one that had been played out on an altogether bigger stage.
Simmons had initially been portrayed as a victim, but as news of his actions became more widely known, sympathy for him began to erode.
Everyone initially talked about Cantona, what a disgrace he was to football … and by the time the court case came round, I always remember this guy, was it Matthew Simmons … his court statement became the stuff of legend … he alleged he marched down the steps and said something like, ‘Oi, Cantona, that’s off for an early bath, you Frenchman’, or something like that and you know, you could almost picture the court convulsed, saying, ‘Are you serious, is this your defence?’ – Iffy Onuora
As it turned out, Simmons had a previous conviction for a racist attack on a Sri Lankan-born petrol station worker and had National Front sympathies. As this information became known, the issue of terrace racism, and fan behaviour more generally, came into sharp focus. The idea that supporters were entitled to behave as they wished with impunity, as some sort of right by virtue of paying an admission fee, began to be challenged.
Cantona had inadvertently done black players a favour. Although the object of abuse had been his nationality, it highlighted the experiences of black footballers, who’d regularly been forced to endure this kind of behaviour and much worse. As Bobby Barnes remarked, ‘We’d have been banned for life and the FA would probably have pressed for a heavy prison sentence. Cantona did us a favour by highlighting the issue … Because he was French, because he played for Manchester United and because he was Eric Cantona, he got away relatively unscathed.’
In February, the month after Cantona’s Selhurst Park kick, the issue of far-right influence and terrace hooliganism came to the forefront again during a friendly international between the Republic of Ireland and England at Lansdowne Road in
Dublin. The match was abandoned after twenty-three minutes due to crowd trouble on the part of England fans, with the far right, and specifically the neo-Nazi organisation Combat 18, implicated in the violence. Reports from British intelligence had indicated that Combat 18 were intent on causing violence and had passed information to the Irish authorities that went largely ignored. With questions being asked about the lack of action on racism on the part of the authorities, and suggestions that England’s hosting of Euro 1996 was in jeopardy, the FA felt compelled to do more. So, too, did the clubs. A more proactive approach to the issue of racism was adopted by a number of clubs, while the FA, the Premier League, the PFA and the Football Foundation all agreed to join forces in funding the new and rebranded Kick It Out campaign.
The impact of all this on black British footballers was palpable, as more were prepared to take a stand and become involved in anti-racist initiatives. This increased confidence in undertaking anti-racist work was only the most obvious outcome for black footballers. With few exceptions, black footballers had previously been unwilling to take this kind of stand against racism for fear that it might have an impact on their careers. Such a stand would, in general, have been unlikely to be viewed with any degree of sympathy. Their commitment and mentality would have been called into question amid reminders of how lucky they were to play professional football. Other talented footballers had taken the decision not to pursue a career in the game, reckoning that the racism and abuse they would be required to suffer was too much of a burden on their self-respect or state of mind.