Pitch Black (20 page)

Ian Wright and Les Ferdinand appeared to reserve their most impressive goal-scoring performances for games against Everton, Ferdinand in particular, ending his career with more goals against Everton than any other side. Wright scored a number of spectacular and important goals against Everton and had done so since his Palace days, when he’d scored two in a 4–1 win in the Zenith Data Systems Trophy at Wembley, a competition played during English clubs’ enforced hiatus from European competition. He’d achieved his first Arsenal hat-trick when he scored all Arsenal’s goals in a 4–2 win against Everton at Highbury, and regularly found the net against them throughout his career. In 2000, a University of Leicester research survey found that of all clubs in the English and Scottish leagues, Everton was the club at which fans had witnessed most racist abuse. It further cemented their reputation.

Outside the top division, racist abuse in the form of terrace chanting was taking longer to die out of the game. There
was still a sizeable proportion of black British players, but the kind of multinational feature of Premier League teams was absent. In addition, media focus on issues of racism outside of the Premier League was such that events often went unreported even by local and regional newspapers. For black players like Huddersfield’s Iffy Onuora, the smaller crowds in sometimes cavernous stadiums often meant that individual taunts could be heard from supporters, who would abuse the 13 stone, 6 foot 3 athlete from the safety of the terraces. ‘I’ve heard it from fans, of course, I’ve had it shouted to me from people stood a few metres away and I’m thinking, if me or you were a bit closer, it would be a very different situation.’

The worst abuse he received was in a first-round FA Cup tie at Darlington. From his first touch of the ball, monkey noises provided the soundtrack to the game. To compound the situation, Onuora had won a disputed penalty, which only seemed to further inflame the racists. He was substituted after around seventy minutes of the game and his manager was later quoted in press reports as saying that he’d substituted Onuora to protect him from further abuse. The following Monday, he arrived at training to find he’d received a handwritten letter from a Darlington fan who’d taken it upon themselves to state how appalled they were at the treatment Onuora had received and to apologise on behalf of decent Darlington fans. Tellingly, there had been no official apology from the club itself.

Of the black British players who played professional football since the 1970s, the majority were of Caribbean heritage.
There were also significant numbers of black footballers of Nigerian heritage who made their way into the professional ranks. While the majority of those of West Indian heritage were, overwhelmingly, working-class, those of Nigerian heritage came from a far wider social spectrum. Many first-generation Nigerians had arrived in the UK to work in transport and in factories and public services like health, in the same way as their Caribbean counterparts. Others were seafarers who had settled in the UK; others had arrived in the UK as students and had settled; others, like John Fashanu’s barrister father, had come to work in the UK as professionals; and others still, like John Chiedozie’s family, had fled Nigeria during the 1967–70 Biafran War.

Whereas the first generation of West Indians were, by and large, cricket fans, that was never the case with Nigerians. Although Nigeria had produced its fair share of boxing and athletics fans, those enthusiasms paled in comparison to the country’s love of football. John Fashanu, Gabby Agbonlahor, Ugo Ehiogu and John Salako are footballers of Nigerian heritage who won full England caps. Justin Fashanu, Remi Moses, Shola Ameobi and Nedum Onuoha were amongst others of Nigerian heritage who have won England U-21 caps. Whereas black people from the Caribbean settled almost exclusively in England and Wales, Nigerian patterns of settlement in the UK were far broader, with a sizeable number venturing north of the border to make Scotland their home. Unlike in England and Wales, therefore, the majority of the black community in Scotland is of African heritage, including Scottish internationals Chris Iwelumo and Ikechi Anya, who are both of Nigerian heritage.

Iffy Onuora was a journeyman striker who spent his career playing outside the top flight. He was born in Glasgow and
grew up in Liverpool, playing representative football. He’d attended Bradford University, gaining a degree in economics. He was also selected to play for British Universities, where he was spotted by Dai Jones, who coached the side and had links with Huddersfield Town. Onuora had had trials at Chesterfield and Chester City, but impressed former Republic of Ireland and then Huddersfield manager Eoin Hand when he was invited to pre-season training.

Onuora’s pace and athleticism persuaded Hand to give him a professional contract, but to be on the safe side, he offered him a one-year contract worth around £100 a week. The day after Onuora signed professionally, he played his first game in a pre-season friendly against Grimsby and came off the bench to score a 25-yard screamer, winning the game for Huddersfield. The only other black player at the club was Huddersfield-born winger Junior Bent, causing a journalist to remark to Hand at a pre-season press conference that the team contained two black players; one was iffy and the other one bent.

In stereotypical fashion, Hand played Onuora on the wing, rather than as a central striker, where he had played at university. Onuora moved to Mansfield in 1994, where he made twenty-eight appearances in two injury-hit seasons. He signed for Gillingham, was converted back into a striker and formed a deadly partnership with Ade Akinbiyi. The two terrorised opposition defences. They were both quick, powerful and strong in the air, and Onuora in particular could, in football parlance, put himself about.

The partnership broke up when Akinbiyi, also of Nigerian heritage, left for a big-money move to Bristol City, after which he went to Wolves and Leicester. In March 1998, Onuora signed for Swindon Town, then embroiled in a
relegation battle in the First Division. He teamed up with George Ndah, south London-born and fellow Nigerian, whom he knew from a brief loan spell that Ndah had spent at Gillingham. Onuora was thrust straight into the side, where his debut began ominously as opponents QPR took an early lead through Nigel Quashie, later to become the first black player to play for Scotland since Andrew Watson in the nineteenth century. Ndah then won a penalty after tempting a Rangers defender into a clumsy challenge in the box, which was tucked away by Mark Walters. With the scores at 1–1, Town had their keeper sent off and had to re-shuffle, which involved their centre-half pulling on the keeper’s jersey.

When a team is reduced to ten men, it often has the effect of galvanising them, particularly when the sending-off has been a harsh one and the team feel a collective sense of injustice. From a tactical perspective, their options are relatively straightforward and they usually reorganise to prioritise defensive solidity and sacrifice attacking intent. For the opposition team, the psychological impact of knowing that your opponents will defend for their lives can play cruel tricks on a side’s mentality. A situation like this often requires tactical adjustments to provide more width or to maximise possession in order to break down a stubborn defence. The burden of expectation often nullifies any numerical advantage and leaves the side devoid of ideas, which increases the longer the game goes on without a breakthrough. With Swindon needing to play for seventy minutes with ten men and desperately needing to get something out of the game, a corner on the stroke of half-time provided a rare opportunity to throw men forward. After a short corner routine, Walters put the ball in the box; Onuora just got ahead of his marker to get on the end of the cross with a diving header. The
Rangers keeper, unable to move, could only watch as the ball sailed past him to bulge the top corner of the net and give Town the lead. Ndah was the first to congratulate the recently prostrate Onuora, as he disappeared under a sea of red shirts. Shell-shocked after throwing away a lead against a struggling side that had a man sent off, Rangers’ second-half onslaught never materialised and Swindon stayed in relative comfort for the remainder of the game.

The following season ended with Town finishing just below mid-table and Onuora finishing as top scorer with twenty goals, a decent return for a side that had previously finished just three points off the relegation places. It was about this time that Onuora was linked with a call-up for the Scottish national side. Under Craig Brown, Scotland played with a succession of diminutive strikers, such as Eoin Jess, Billy Dodds and Mo Johnston, and even used midfielders Neil McCann and Don Hutchison in the striker’s role. At the time, Scotland were playing with one up front with a player completely unsuitable for the role. They were desperate for a target man who could hold the ball up and Onuora fitted the bill perfectly. He was in good goal-scoring form in a league one removed from the Premiership and could provide an option that Scotland didn’t have. Brown had been made aware of Onuora’s form and eligibility and was questioned about a possible call-up by the Scottish press. Speculation mounted as to whether Onuora would be the first black player to represent Scotland in the modern era. However, Onuora was consistently overlooked, as were the claims of young Hibs winger Kevin Harper. Brown had stuck rigidly to the same set of players who had qualified for Euro ’96, but desperately needed to refresh the ageing squad with new blood. Brown’s conservatism militated against the
claims of Onuora and Harper and it wasn’t until the appointment of Berti Vogts that the honour of becoming the first black player to receive a Scotland cap in over 100 years went eventually to Nigel Quashie in 2004.

Professional footballers were responding positively to football’s anti-racist initiatives. The instances of players racially abusing their fellow professionals were becoming increasingly rare. The results of a PFA survey published in April 2000 showed that 58 per cent of footballers had witnessed racist behaviour and that 90 per cent thought that initiatives such as Kick It Out had reduced racist incidents. However, although the attitude of players was changing, amongst those who were responsible for running the game, attitudes seemed entrenched. In December 2001, former referee Gurnam Singh won a landmark employment tribunal case against the Football League, who had overlooked him for promotion to the Premier League because of his Asian background. The tribunal found that he had been passed over for promotion despite finishing top, in favour of two other referees who had lower scores than him, and that in 1995, the FA Director of Refereeing, Ken Ridden, had commented about Singh that ‘we don’t want people like him in the Premier League’. Singh was removed from the league list of referees in 1999, the highest-ranking referee ever to be sacked

ON 3 MAY
1998, Justin Fashanu was found dead in a lockup garage in east London. Fashanu had been one of the most promising strikers in England when playing for Norwich City in the early 1980s and became England's first £1 million black footballer when he was sold to Nottingham Forest in 1981. He was by no means the first big-money striker to be labelled a flop, and a combination of the psychological weight of the fee, plus poor management of him, led to an unhappy time at Forest. Fashanu came out at a time when the government employed openly hostile discourse and discriminatory legislation against homosexuality. The language used by tabloid newspapers was often designed to incite outright hostility. Unlike other footballers who came out at a time of their own choosing, so enabling them to manage their announcement and choose whether they wanted to inform friends, family and colleagues, Fashanu was denied the right to choose when and whether to go public. With his sexuality about to be exposed by the tabloid press, Fashanu negotiated a five-figure deal with
The Sun
to come out, and in the process he told lurid and questionable tales of sexual encounters with MPs and soap stars, lying about many of his exploits in return for cash. Subjected to homophobic chanting,
he was also vilified by
The Voice
, the newspaper targeted at Britain's black community, who described his sexuality as an affront to the black community. He was also ill equipped to manage his public relations affairs. He seemed embroiled in a pattern of self-destructive behaviour: the by-product of being openly gay in the hyper-masculine world of football, as well as being an evangelical Christian, and therefore belonging to a group whose attitude to sexuality was distinctly Old Testament. Not only did Fashanu become the first openly gay footballer, he remains the only openly gay, high-profile black British male in the game. While his status as a victim was cemented after the coroner's verdict of suicide at the age of thirty-seven, it is easy to forget how talented a player he was. His brother John went on to win full England caps and had a very good career, but Justin was technically a far more gifted footballer than his brother and, with the right handling, at the right club and in the right age, could have gone on to have the kind of career that would have greatly eclipsed his brother's substantial achievements.

On 22 April 1993 at around 10.30 in the evening on a main road in Eltham in south-east London, an event that was to last for no more than ten to fifteen seconds was to have a profound impact on British society – so much so that few areas of public life, including football, would escape its impact. Eighteen-year-old Stephen Lawrence received two stab wounds to a depth of about 5 inches on both sides of the front of his body to his chest and arm, with both wounds severing axillary arteries. In spite of the partial collapse of his right lung, which had been inflicted by one of the stab
wounds, he managed to stumble 130 or so yards up the road before collapsing and bleeding to death.

The BNP had located its headquarters in Welling in 1987, close to where Stephen Lawrence was murdered. By 1993, Greenwich Council reported that there had been a 210 per cent increase in racist attacks, which had included four racist murders. Weeks before the murder of Stephen Lawrence, Gurdeep Bhangal was stabbed with a kitchen knife in Eltham by the same gang who'd attacked Lawrence. The knife went through his stomach and missed his spine by a centimetre. He survived. Twenty months earlier, in February 1991, fifteen-year-old Rolan Adams was set upon by a group of around fifteen white men who racially abused him and stabbed him to death. Only one of the group was convicted of his murder. In July 1992, Rohit Duggal was stabbed to death outside a kebab shop. A man with links to the gang who murdered Lawrence was convicted of his murder. According to local racism monitors, twelve families had fled the area and it was well known as a hotbed of racist activity.

The subsequent botched police investigation and failure to provide the Lawrence family with justice would likely have been the end of the matter, as far as the vast majority of the general public was concerned, had it not been for the determination and tenacity of the Lawrence family. The Macpherson Report was published in February 1999 and not only investigated the circumstances surrounding the murder but kicked off a wide-ranging discussion into racism and race relations in the UK. It was in this context that a series of reports and recommendations into racism and football took place. The media, much of which had historically been hostile to anti-racist justice campaigns, reflected the mood of
the political and social establishment in acknowledging that racism was a major feature of British society.

Macpherson's report had popularised the term ‘institutional racism', a description of how, through structures and systems, organisations undertook racist practices unwittingly, rather than through a conscious decision to actively discriminate against racial minorities. A number of organisations fell over themselves to embrace the new terminology, providing them with an opportunity to characterise their discriminatory practice as accidental or unfortunate, rather than as a consequence of decisions taken by individuals. A perfect illustration of this came a few months after the publication of the report, when, in July 1999, Northern General Hospital in Sheffield accepted kidneys for transplantation from a donor who had insisted that the recipient should be white. When the news emerged, the hospital stated: ‘Under no circumstances can we condone the acceptance of organs where there are conditions attached.' The institution appeared happy to take the blame for this rather than holding the individuals who had made the decision to account.

The report did have a galvanising effect in providing the confidence to tackle racism. Later that year, in October, staff at Ford's Dagenham plant held a strike ballot after both black and white workers walked out in protest at racist behaviour and bullying on the part of management. They also protested that only a small proportion of senior managerial posts went to non-whites in spite of an ethnically diverse workforce. The company had long been notorious for the degree to which racism was allowed to run unchecked within the plant. Far-right and racist literature had been openly on display at the plant during the 1970s and Brendon Batson had cited friends who worked at the plant as being
constantly on the receiving end of racist abuse from middle and senior management. In 1996, Ford had invited five ethnic minority staff to pose for a brochure that aimed to show the racial diversity of the plant, where 45 per cent of the staff were non-white. When the brochures were published, the black faces were replaced with white faces. Citing the need to appeal to the eastern European market, Ford's were faced with a walkout from hundreds of workers, with an estimated £2.8 million worth of lost production as a result.

As Lord Macpherson was preparing his report and Parliament awaited its publication, the ‘Eliminating Racism from Football' report was generally welcomed by the media as they caught the prevailing mood. For the first time a consensus was brewing in terms of media reporting of racism within football. Prior to Eric Cantona's watershed kung-fu kick, racist incidents and terrace abuse had gone largely unreported and had even been famously described by John Motson as ‘good-natured barracking' when Holland's Ruud Gullit was on the receiving end of abuse by England fans in an international ‘friendly' at Wembley in 1988.

Macpherson's report had gone much further than the issues surrounding the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the handling of the subsequent murder inquiry, and the issues he raised around the state of race relations in Britain were underlined when, in August 2000, Britain's record on race relations was harshly criticised by the United Nations. They condemned the number of non-whites who suffered police brutality and died in police custody; the disproportionately high incidences of black unemployment; under-representation of ethnic minorities in politics, the army and the police; and highlighted the large number of black children expelled from schools. The government would later sign up to
a common EU plan to combat racism, but it pointedly opted out from an obligation to criminalise certain forms of racist behaviour. An amended Race Relations Act came into force in 2001, briefly providing some hope that issues of racism and discrimination in public life would be systematically challenged and that comprehensive plans to achieve equality would be made. Where the introduction of the new Act should have acted as the start of an onslaught against racism and discrimination, instead it became the point at which the politicians seemed to congratulate themselves on a job well done and went about their business, much the same as usual.

Meanwhile, a resurgent Leeds United made a bold statement of intent when, in November 2000, they broke the British transfer record and the world record fee for a defender when they signed Rio Ferdinand from West Ham United for £18 million. The sale of Ferdinand, who had come through the Hammers youth system and was one of a crop of talented youngsters, naturally caused concern amongst West Ham's fans about the future direction of the club. Their concerns would prove to be well placed as the club struggled over the next few seasons and sold an entire generation of its youth system.

Despite the increased willingness to embrace and celebrate football's diversity, the issue of attendance of black supporters at matches continued to receive very little attention. A 2001 fan survey found that of all the clubs in the Premier League, Arsenal had the highest proportion of black supporters of any top-flight team. It is common to find at football grounds across the country that there are more black
people on the pitch than there are in the stands. Cyrille Regis has suggested that the lack of black supporters in attendance at football matches is due to cultural differences. Attending football matches as part of a Saturday afternoon ritual was something that people from black communities didn't do in the way that was ingrained within many white working-class communities. This lack of attendance at matches even extended towards the football-mad older generation of Nigerians and other Africans. For those of Caribbean heritage, a preference for cricket also militated against widespread attendance at football matches, particularly where the cost of attendance added an additional impediment to active support. Amongst later generations of black supporters, the widespread incidence of racist abuse, along with far-right influence at grounds, made attendance at games a threatening experience. Clubs in London and the West Midlands, Manchester City amongst others, were located in areas with large, ethnically diverse communities, but generally failed to attract a significant proportion of these fans to games.

For Arsenal, their position as the side with the highest proportion of black fans in the country began with a crop of young apprentices who came through the Arsenal youth system. Paul Davis was the first of the crop to play in the first team and was later joined by Raphael Meade, Gus Caesar and Chris Whyte. Meade, Caesar and Whyte all moved on, but it was only when Davis was joined by David Rocastle, Michael Thomas, Kevin Campbell and then later by the signings of Viv Anderson and Ian Wright that the incidence of four or five black players in the side gave a message to the local black community that Highbury was a safe place to go. Furthermore, Arsenal began to attract black fans from other parts of London, a process that gathered pace upon
Wright's arrival at the club. The era also coincided with a period of success for the club under George Graham and then later under Arsène Wenger's stewardship. Other clubs have at times played black footballers in their side, but have rarely played a number of local black players, and certainly not for a sustained period of time. In the Premier League era, black footballers from overseas have provided important role models for Arsenal's black supporters to identify with. Players such as Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, Nicolas Anelka, Lauren, Kanu, Eboué and Touré have been joined by black British players like Cole, Campbell, Walcott, Oxlade Chamberlain, Welbeck and others to maintain high numbers of black players, with the result that the club have attracted support not only from its north London hinterland but from outside of London too.

One of Arsenal's legends, Ian Wright, retired at the end of the 1999/2000 season after a four-month spell with Burnley, in which his four goals from fifteen games helped them win promotion from Division Two. It brought to an end a playing career that had elevated Wright to the status of cult hero not only, as you'd expect, from fans of Arsenal and Crystal Palace, but also amongst a generation of black football fans who were drawn to his ability and goal-scoring feats. They were also drawn to his attitude and persona, and to his rags-to-riches story as a late developer who had been signed from the amateur ranks at the age of twenty-one and who at Palace had formed a legendary strike partnership with Mark Bright, their goals helping to fire Palace into the top flight. A dramatic cameo in the 1990 FA Cup final against Manchester United, where a semi-fit Wright's two goals forced extra time and a replay, sealed his legendary status as an all-time Palace great. Over six seasons at Palace, Wright became their
record post-war goal scorer and third on the Palace all-time scoring list. In 2005, he was named by Palace fans as their player of the century.

Wright's style of play contained an ‘edge' that endeared him to Arsenal fans and made him a figure of hate amongst opposing fans. This side to his game could probably be best characterised as somewhat spiteful and was best illustrated by the altogether nasty two-footed challenge Wright inflicted on Manchester United keeper Peter Schmeichel in February 1997, which was widely interpreted as revenge for an allegation that Schmeichel had called Wright a ‘fucking black bastard' after the two had collided the previous November in a typically feisty encounter. Wright had refused to press for action against Schmeichel and in spite of lip-reading evidence suggesting the contrary, police claimed there had been insufficient evidence to press charges.