Robert Exley
First up – never confuse me with a liberal. In life, bad things very often happen to good people. Conversely, far too many good things come to those who are bad, so when bad things happen to bad people, don’t waste too much time feeling sorry for them. It is true that, even if you were to discount our partiality to Arsenal Football Club, Emmanuel Adebayor is an individual it is thoroughly difficult, if not impossible, to like – let alone empathise with.
His form for his first two seasons was so frustrating, it led on one memorable occasion to his strike partner, the far more legendary Thierry Henry, to punch the Highbury turf in anger against Aston Villa in 2006. By 2007/08 he finally hit form, however, at the end of which season he repaid his manager’s and Arsenal’s faith by demanding a move to a bigger-name club stating that Arsenal didn’t match his personal ambitions, told Arsenal to ‘show how much we loved him’ in monetary terms, and then, after a season of sulking, left for Manchester City – a side who at this point hadn’t won a trophy for over 30 years nor were competing in the Champions League, but who conveniently agreed to pay him £170,000 of their newly-acquired petrodollars per week.
After scoring in his first match against us, he deliberately ran the length of the pitch to goad the away support, while hiding behind stewards who were injured in the process of protecting him from the angry mob of thousands of travelling Arsenal fans. In the same match he nearly kicked his former team mate, Robin Van Persie’s, eye out of his socket. Off the pitch he’s been involved in an altercation with his then team-mate, and former Arsenal team-mate, Kolo Touré, at City’s training ground. He then tops this off by signing on loan for our bitter rivals up the other end of the Seven Sisters Road. Therefore it is agreed that Emmanuel Adebayor is never going to receive a standing ovation whenever his path crosses Arsenal Football Club.
That said, when it comes to laughing at the misfortune of an individual who is put into a situation where he fears for his safety, well-being, even his life – there is a select band of people for whom I reserve this perverse joy. They tend to be sex-offenders, child-murderers, despots, sex-traffickers, those who indulge in or fund terrorist acts that deliberately target civilians – in essence people who generally prey on and exploit the weak, vulnerable and defenceless (and, before anyone wonders, no: I don’t support capital punishment. I just rejoice at any misfortune experienced by the aforementioned because they are thoroughly bad people). Now, Emmanuel Adebayor is the walking embodiment of everything that’s wrong with 21st century footballers – he is an arrogant, self-serving, mammon-worshipper who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. For all his faults, though, he is – at least to my knowledge – not any of the aforementioned social pariahs. The fact that he’s disrespected my club doesn’t make it OK for me to rejoice in what was an attempt on his and his team mates’ lives by the gunfire of cowardly terrorists in a terrifying ordeal that lasted for around 20 minutes.
Also, don’t confuse me with some over-sensitive po-faced PC drone. I’ve followed this game long enough to know that prominent opposition players and former Arsenal opposition players habitually receive stick from fans. I’m also aware that this is a fairly tame era when it comes to bad-taste chanting, and well aware that Redknapp’s indignation was largely disingenuous, seeing that we heard little from him when Spurs fans actually invented this chant and, along with the other elephant washing one, sang it long before we actually ever took it up. However, there is a world of difference between this particular chant and others that centre on embarrassing elements of a player’s private life, such as their sexual infidelities, their penchant for paying for sex with grandmothers, or their liking for placing their mobile phones in their rectal orifices. There is, after all, a world of difference between the psychological damage of dying from embarrassment and the psychological damage from nearly dying and seeing acquaintances dying amid a sea of bullets. I doubt any of these fans would dream of taunting a 7/7 survivor who just so happens to support Spurs about his or her ordeal that day and trying to pass it off as ‘banter’, so why do such people think these chants are any different?
It’s not that they lack a moral compass, either. The forum of this site carried a thread that rightly denounced a plankton-brained Spurs troll who tweeted Jack Wilshere to say he wished death on his new-born child, yet some of the very same posters who denounced the idiot were on another thread claiming that the Adebayor chant was fair game, obviously seeing no contradiction in condemning one and condoning the other. Also, the article on this site in October by Mr Burton, which in some way tried to justify the Adebayor chants, was a poorly-written piece, the logic behind which was ill thought out, to say the least. On the mindlessly violent element that follows North London’s lesser club he stated: ‘If I wanted a fight, I would join a boxing club. If you want to fight my team’s Firm, go and do it with them – away from the ground, keeping it between yourselves – but just let us know who wins. Leave me alone. And my mates. And don’t bring blades (only cowards need blades) and, if you are offered a one-to-one, be big enough to take it and don’t say “no, you against six of us”. And don’t hang around on corners with all your mates and wait for the opposition’s fans to walk past so you can randomly punch one just because he supports the other team’.
Mr Burton, however, fails to see the contradiction behind this statement and gleefully singing about the antics of a cowardly group of terrorists carrying armoury far greater and more life-threatening than blades, who, rather than randomly punching someone in the head, actually killed two civilians in cold blood. I think it’s also fair to say that, aside from the fact that most of the people chanting this sort of stuff have little, if any, idea of what it is like to be caught up in such a terrorist attack, they also rank quite high in the cowardice stakes because, though they’d happily chant such things while sitting or standing among big groups of people, I doubt anyone of them would have the cojones to walk up and say it to the face of a 6ft 5in tall professional sportsman in the peak of physical fitness. You see, the upshot of it is that such people try and pass off those who criticise them for making these chants as being in some way less of a fan, when - in reality - by possessing a mentality that makes you think that chanting such stuff in the first place is remotely acceptable, you are in essence less of a man.
