Glen Kamara

He was crying. A grown man crying tears of devastation. But he confronted it – confronted everyone – and, everywhere he looked, no-one would meet his stare. The crying man was the brave man, swimming against a sea of cowards.

I was 14 so you’ll not be surprised I can’t recall the exact circumstances, where the terracing tickets came from. But I know we were all originally meant to be in the comparative calm and safety of the main stand for Scotland v England on 26 May 1984.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been on the old Hampden West Terrace - the “Rangers End” – and I can’t remember if it was section J or H behind that goal, but it was definitely the first time I’d been without an adult.

Somewhere between catching the train from Ardrossan South Beach to Glasgow Central, tartan scarf chaffing the neck, and being smuggled into what later became the Solid Rock Café on Hope Street, Coca Cola at the window table, three terracing tickets suddenly became an option for my dad and his mate Michael.

Michael’s son, Jim, and Jim’s best friend, Craig, both 15, instantly joined me in pleading our cases. I can’t remember all the conditions but the main ones were “don’t die and don’t tell your mothers”.

Maybe the dads just wanted peace but, as we hadn’t in any way curtailed their drinking, it’s more likely they thought it was a right of passage they couldn’t deny us. Or an education in the ways of the world we badly needed.

Well, it was certainly educational.

Oh, we loved it. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. Falling about the place in a crowd of well over 70,000; Cascading down a dozen steps and back when Mark McGhee headed past Peter Shilton right in front of us:

In the world of desire that was my early teenage years, seeing that ball go inside the square posts and yurt-sized nets of Mount Florida was rare fulfillment.

Being on that terrace was what I regarded, as only a kid can, as the full adult experience. And looking back I’m so happy I did old Hampden, old style, in the oldest international fixture on the planet. Played at 3pm on a Saturday too.

But I can’t be truly proud. And not just because watching a football match isn’t really, in the scheme of things, an achievement.

It was a beautiful sunny day. Although, famously, sections J and H comprised the only roofed terracing at Hampden, I remember it being warm even up the back, probably from the compacted bodies singing and jumping in the very way that made Jim, Craig and I so desperate to be in this fabled part of this fabled ground.

And there was a young black man a few rows (i.e., people) in front of us. He was older than us but probably early 20s at most. And at first I thought he was sweating. And he might have been. But he was also crying – and crying with a horrified disappointment the like of which I had never seen before, had never known, but instantly understood.

He was wearing the 1978 white Scotland away top. The one I got while in primary school (Umbro – an absolute classic). And he wore a tartan tammy and, I’m sure, sported a huge Scotland rosette on his chest. And he’d been enjoying himself up here.

It’s a sad fact that anything other than a white face on the Hampden terraces in 1984 was even rarer then than it is today. I know this man had been enjoying himself because he was briefly the exotic centre of attention from all these banterish adults my pals and I found so intoxicatingly “laddish”.

I have a recollection of him being greeted overly fondly, in a well-intended but ultimately patronising manner by immediate members of a Tartan Army that was then just a collective noun for the crowd at a Scotland home game, rather than the self-congratulatory faux lifestyle it became.

But at least that lifestyle eschewed what happened next.

That man, a fellow Scotland fan, was enjoying himself. He was at the centre of the camaraderie. And then Mark Chamberlain got the ball.

Then John Barnes got the ball.

Then Luther Blissett.  

And the "famous Hampden Roar" began dipping itself in the sewer.

The ooh-oohing started. Slowly. Imperceptibly at first. But then rising to a horrific volume, particularly up the back of that huge stereo speaker – that gargantuan loudhailer - that was a colossal, packed terrace under a comprehensive metal roof.

Chamberlain, Barnes and Blissett will have heard it next loudest – these men knew only too well the sound of animals impersonating animals - but most overpowered by this most disgusting of mass insults was the poor man in front of me and my young pals.

I know I realised straight away. I realised the horror, not of the chant – oh no – but realising that as that chant went on, rather than miles away on a distant pitch, there was a black man right in front of me. I know I was scared to see the real consequences of such behaviour. But I don’t know if I was scared or upset for him or even in any way empathetic.

I genuinely can’t remember. While I hope I sympathised, I'm pretty sure I didn't help the man and, if this behaviour from thousands of fellow working class Scots was the world I lived in, who knows how it affected me because, make no mistake, racist behaviour comes from social conditioning.

Christ, maybe I thought he’d find it funny. This was 1984 and I honestly can’t remember what I felt and thought about racism because, frankly, I didn’t have to deal with it. There was precisely one black family in all of Ardrossan. And it wasn’t mine.

I hope I was sympathetic and I certainly hope to hell I hadn’t joined in the chanting. I feel I didn’t but who knows what hormone-addled 14-year-old me would have done in an attempt to fit into the carnival of the illicit that was standing in the rowdy section without our parents.

I know I loved the singing and the swearing – I almost certainly booed God Save the Queen in the same way I’d have lustily sung it on the East Enclosure a few weeks earlier. These were the days when we weren’t so literal in our fandom – we were allowed joyful hypocrisies like that.

But I hope to hell I knew back then that making that noise whenever a black man touched a football was beyond hypocrisy and way, way beyond sport.

The one thing I haven’t said is I’m sure he couldn’t speak. At all. Every time I look back on it, and we’re talking 37 years now, I have this idea that this man literally had no voice, which is why he’d been so emotive of expression when everyone was being patronisingly nice to him.

I’m worried this detail isn't a memory so much as me retrospectively imposing a metaphor of helplessness. But I’ll never forget how his face dropped as he realised what he was hearing around him from these previously friendly, welcoming people. In front of my eyes too young to process or deal with what they were seeing, this man's spirit was slowly, visibly crushed.

He immediately began jostling and grabbing those around him. People, stood right beside him, who’d been exchanging pleasantries with him just moments earlier, were making that horrible noise at those three England players. His eyes screamed a devastated “why?” in their faces.

And those he approached refused to meet his gaze. Some briefly patted him on the back as if to dismiss it as harmless banter. Yes, banter. Even though it would be decades before I knew what to call it, that moment – seeing those Scotland fans genuinely trying to brush off horrific racist abuse as bantz - was my first awareness of white privilege.

The most he got by way of response was “it’s not you, mate – it’s them we’re doing it to, those England players”. 

And he pointed at himself. No, you’re doing it to me. When you make that noise, even if you think you’re only aiming it at those three England players, you’re doing it to me. And my family. And millions of others.

The Tartan Army should have lost its mystique for me that day, even as a kid. But that only happened in later years when the kilt-wearing, doe; a deer attention-seekers takeover caused me to look back on the incident.

Yes, at age 14 I just saw it as an “incident”, almost a fucking curio. The real import only dawned as I grew up. For that man in front of me on the Rangers End it was hell on earth, a betrayal of trust that I could understand intellectually but, in all honesty, will never be able to fully understand emotionally.

Tony Woodcock equalised for England. A 1-1 draw and, no doubt, a great day out for me and my two pals. I remember us yakking all the way back on the train to Ardrossan, sans dads (our mums knew they’d be staying in the pub anyway), and then the bus from station to end of street, and I remember feeling I’d had a big, grown-up day out.

Glen Kamara wouldn’t be born for another eleven years. The Czech Republic was still part of Czechoslovakia at that time, still a satellite of the USSR. Hampden is now an all-seater, all-covered venue and whenever I’ve been there this century I love the excuse to sit down, rest my voice and concentrate on the football.

So much has changed. So much has modernised. And yet this week a black man was racially abused in a Glasgow football stadium during a match screened live on TV.

There was no crowd at this one. Glen Kamara’s racial abuser asked him to wait while he stepped over an injured colleague to shout his disgusting abuse directly into Glen’s ear. This man was sober and sharp and he was a fellow player on that pitch meant to unite everyone who steps on it as sportsmen.

It wasn’t just a betrayal of trust and sportsmanship. It was a betrayal of human advancement. It was the basest of insults to the very emotional and intellectual principles on which Slavia Prague were formed in 1892 - formed as a literary and debating society for the advancement of the Czech language under the rule of German-speaking Austro-Hungary.  

Slavia’s opponents for the 2008 match to commemorate the redevelopment of their stadium were Oxford University, one of their first opponents back in the 19^th century when they were founded by medical students. This is a club founded by thinkers. What an inversion of their legacy.

Watching a football match without indulging in racial abuse isn’t an achievement – it’s the minimum expected of us as human beings. Watching a game of football where a player with black team-mates racially abuses an opponent isn’t more sickening than any other racist attack but it’s the true depth of this societal sickness shown in starkest relief.

What we saw on Thursday night was genuinely disturbing. And I can be as proud as I like of the Rangers team for waiting down the tunnel for Slavia, of our club for their solid defence of Glen Kamara – but I can only be sorry for Glen that he had to endure that, and truly sorry to him for every part of my miserable life where I’ve unwittingly enabled that kind of action.

I’ll never patronise him by saying I understand. By that biggest of flukes, birth, I’m white - I can’t truly understand. But I’ll join in with the rest of the Rangers support in supporting him in every way we can. By trying to make sure this never happens again.