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At the chalkface: The nightmare returns

Teaching staff
But most fans are nothing like les cretins dans Le Metro. How do you get like that? Their team has mostly foreign players. Are they in a state of terminal schizophrenia? Do they boo their own team? Hit themselves?

This was, apparently, “banter” – “bantz”. Some even claimed it wasn’t “really racist”. Ah. Like it wasn’t racist when Chelsea’s John Terry called QPR’s Anton Ferdinand a “fucking black c*nt”, or when Big Ron Atkinson called World Cup winner Marcel Desailly “a fucking lazy thick n*gger”. The ambiguities are still rather lost on me.

I thought we were rid of this nonsense. I thought it had gone by the end of the 1980s. I still can recall the bear pit of Chelsea’s Shed End with its National Front thugs.

Surely the nightmare’s not returning? I’m baffled. I’ve been a fan of West London’s finest, QPR, for 30 years. It nourishes a bracing stoicism, a grim fatalism, and occasional suicidal tendencies, as yet another defeat is plucked from the jaws of victory. Despair is our comfort zone. We don’t do hope. But we don’t do racism either.

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