Morning all,

it’s a late one due to the fact it’s a bank holiday here. There’s still no real update regarding Fabrice Muamba, although the situation itself has brought out the best of many and the worst of others.

Clearly the football world has been dominated by the story, and maybe it’s no bad thing that people reflect on behaviour and the lack of basic decency that plagues the game these days. Witness the fantastic gesture of Real Madrid, offering support to Muamba and Barcelona’s Eric Abidal, and compare with Derby fans singing about Nottingham Forest’s recently deceased chairman.

That’s not to single out Derby fans but it’s surely illustrative of how the line is crossed far too often these days, by fans of every club. Nobody can claim to be whiter than white. After the Everton game in December I cringed listening to (admittedly drunk, as it was quite late in the day) Arsenal fans singing about how it should have been Adebayor shot to death in Angola.

I have no time whatsoever for Adebayor, I think he’s pretty dislikeable as a player, as a person he sums up all that’s wrong with the modern mercenary footballer, but although it might be ‘just a song’ and part of the black humour that has always been a part of football, couldn’t we do without it? The same way that Liverpool and United fans could probably do without reminding each other of people who have died. Does it really matter why or how?

Online we see people say the most outrageous things. You can call it trolling if you like, but that tends to suggest there’s a modicum of intelligence involved. And what happens is people react, people repeat what has been said to inform others of their outrage, providing oxygen to the original idiot and it all spirals from there.

It’s good when people are held accountable for what they say. What seems to be missed by many of these idiots of the permanency of the Internet. You can delete your account all you want but re-tweets, screenshots, caches and all kinds of things will ensure that there’s a record of what you said or did. In that sense the name and shame stuff works well.

That said, there is a part of me that wishes we could evolve to a point where we simply learn to ignore people whose only motivation is to wind others up. That’s not restricted to football, by the way, but it’s human nature to react to a newspaper, a columnist, a TV or radio presenter, a shock-jock, a politician etc that says something that goes against what we would consider decent and even human.

The Howard Stern effect. More listeners hate him than like him but the ones who hate him can’t help but listen so they can be offended and complain. Without this significant portion of the audience they become less effective. The same way that if the coverage of a particular newspaper offends you, the best way to deal with it is not to read that newspaper. Writing about it, directing people to their website etc, seems counter-productive to me. If you know it’s a piece of shit with less morality than a room full of child killers, why allow yourself to be wound up by it and, in the process, wind up others?

It’s a Utopian thought, I guess, that we can simply choose to ignore that which we find reprehensible, and in some cases it’s probably not the best way to deal with it, but the simplest and most effective way of existing without these people is not to pay any attention to them. If there’s a website you don’t like, don’t visit it. If there’s a Twitter account you hate, don’t follow. A radio show you can’t stand, choose another station.

Free speech is great but the ability to not listen to free speech is even better. We have that choice and we should use it more often. And I say this as somebody who believes there’s a sanitisation of football which is not always positive. There is a need for rivalry, for tribalism, for wit and humour borne out of that, but at the end of the day these people are just pantomime villains.

There are people in this world who I would happily see chucked under a bus. And I mean actually chucked under a bus. Those who do harm to others in all kinds of ways, who peddle and thrive on hatred, who refuse to treat all people equally, the list is pretty much endless to be honest, but somewhere along the way we’ve got to remember that we should have an expectation of decency and manners and human dignity from each other.

For all the words and songs and everything else that goes with Arsenal v Sp*rs, remember when David Rocastle died. The silence was perfectly respected by both sets of fans, the way it should be. And while Sp*rs fans deserve credit for the way they behaved that day, isn’t it sad that we should even have to worry that somebody, or some small group of people, might spoil it, might think it all right to use football as a way to disrespect a man who has died tragically young?

As I said, no set of fans is whiter than white, there will always be those willing to cross a line. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes because they don’t believe there is a line, or the line is somewhere further down the road. It’s hard to imagine it changing, but things have down the years, just slowly.

There now (in 2012!) appears to be a much wider awareness and criticism of racial abuse – although those in charge of the game still seem to fudge the issue in many ways when a stronger message could, and should, have been sent years ago. There are still many taboos which football needs to overcome, and hopefully will do in time.

It’s a cliché to say what happened to Fabrice Muamba puts things in perspective, but maybe it’s also a moment where we stood back a bit and really took stock about the way the game is going and how we talk about it. Regardless of his situation, it’s long been a bug bear of mine that so many people think disagreement = argument = abuse. It is possible to disagree with somebody without calling them names, without resorting to the kind of crap you wouldn’t tolerate from kindergarten kids.

There might well be a worldwide recession but people should remember that manners cost nothing.