More Racism in Football

Racism continues to rare it's ugly head in professional football.

Last night Oldham defender Tom Adeyemi was visibly upset after being racially abused in the FA Cup match at Liverpool. This is a tough call. Tom is on loan to Oldham from Norwich City. I know him a little from his time at Norwich when we acted as landlords for a number of Norwich's academy players. Tom visited us on a couple of occasions. In addition Tom attended my old school The Norwich School. Tom is a highly intelligent and polite young man and it is easy to see how he would become upset. So in this situation we have a highly intelligent black footballer being abused by a moronic Scouser who just happens to be white.

The problem is just where do you draw the racism line and how far can players go in complaining against what is chanted at them during a match. Recently when Norwich played Tottenham, Spurs' world class player Gareth Bale was subjected to considerable verbal abuse. He got on with the game.

Ultimately football has to somehow end all obnoxious chanting and fans have to realise that swearing and chanting remarks at players whether they be racist or not should not be tolerated. The Liverpool fan should have been arrested for his racist remarks. Unfortunately matches cannot be stopped whenever a player is subjected to abuse. On those grounds no match would ever finish.It is the fans themselves who can put an end to the abuse by 1/ cutting it out themselves and 2/ reporting anybody guilty of unacceptable behaviour. Somehow I can't see this happening.

That leads us onto a rather ridiculous situation whereby Labour leader Ed Miliband has been openly criticised in his Twitter message about the passing of Bob Holness. Milliband's crime was to make a typo error in his message, calling Holness' quiz blockbusters instead of Blockbusters. Some newspapers went on the racist slur front again. Now I'm no lover of politicians but actually feel sorry for Milliband on this one. It was just a typing error, the same as we all make. I'm sure there will be typos in this message. To suggest it is racial is utterly ridiculous. The only crime the Labour leader has committed is not checking his message before either he or somebody else sent it.

Today we went to Cromer for a walk. It was cold but very bright. Missed Norwich's comfortable 4-1 FA Cup win over Burnley on the grounds that I expected them to get knocked out as they always seem to do in the early rounds of the cup. So at least a nice surprise there