English football still has a problem with race – but not among the players

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/26/english-football-race-players-separate-tables

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The controversy generated by pictures of black and white England Under-21 players lunching at separate tables, and also forming separate groups in the swimming pool and on the exercise bikes, is a powerful reminder that issues connected with everyday behaviour in a multiracial society have not been resolved and might never be.

Related: Football Association welcomes a 70% rise in reporting racist abuse

The pictures do suggest that the behaviour of football players has not moved on since the 80s. Back then Garth Crooks, who as a player suffered horrendous racial abuse from fans, was asked by a fellow Tottenham team mate at a social gathering: “Why do you blacks always stick together?” To which Crooks responded: “Why do you whites always stick together? I always see Bryan Robson alongside Ray Wilkins not next to Viv Anderson or John Barnes?”

Back then, with football in denial about race, Crooks laughed it off. Now the reaction of the football authorities shows how sensitive the subject has become, as exemplified in the response of Gareth Southgate, who manages the Under-21 team. After emphasising that football can break through racial barriers he turned on the media, saying: “I’m looking at a room of journalists and it’s not very multicultural.”

Southgate is right in the sense that the game has moved a long way on the field of play since I first reported on football, while the media has not. In September 1978, when I reported my first match, Chelsea v Tottenham for the Sunday Times, there were no black players on the field and I was probably the only brown face at Stamford Bridge, certainly in the press box. Just before the match started I was asked: “Who are you reporting this match for, the Southall Express?”

Last month, back at the Bridge for the last match of the season, the Chelsea players, having already won the Premiership, hoisted Didier Drogba off the pitch while the rest of the Chelsea crowd joined in this affectionate farewell to their much loved black striker. Yet looking round me in the press box I could see only one other non-white face.

And football managers now are also very aware that they live in a multiracial society. In my early years as a football reporter, postmatch press conferences would always see me singled out by managers unable to get over the fact that I was a solitary brown face in a sea of whites. Lawrie McMenemy, then Southampton manager, even suggested I was at the wrong sport. After a heavy defeat at Luton, and upset by my question, he retorted: “Should you not be reporting hockey?” – clearly thinking that’s what an Indian would be more interested in. It is a measure of how much society has changed that while David Pleat, the Luton manager, was the only one shocked by McMenemy’s comment, today a manager would not survive the wrath he would provoke on social media.

In my early years as a football reporter, in postmatch press conferences I was a solitary brown face in a sea of whites

Where football is yet to change is in the management structure, from coaches and managers upwards all the way to the boardroom and the Football Association. There, to see a black or brown face is a major discovery, and it is this gap between the world of men in shorts and men in suits – and they are still largely men – that shapes wider social attitudes. It means that for the white people there is little or no experience of a person in authority not being white, and for ethnic minorities there is a natural tendency to congregate around the few who have made it to the top.

The story of Heather Rabbats, who in December 2011 become the first woman to join the board of the FA – and the first black board member of either sex in its 150-year history – is very relevant. Rabbats, whose father was English and mother Jamaican, should be a heroine for both communities. But she says, “I get much more support actually in the African and Caribbean community.” Such is the “level of respect and admiration” she gets when she talks to black and ethnic minority audiences, and not just on sport, that it makes her “always feel deeply uncomfortable”. Her explanation is: “Because we are still very few, we’re the people’s life raft.”

It is only when the likes of Rabbats stop having to be life rafts for entire communities that we shall move to a truly postracial world and acquire the confidence to treat people we meet from different backgrounds as something to celebrate, not a reminder of past barriers. But the reaction to the pictures shows that day is still a long way off.