Kamara Stands: Others Hide

                                

In October 1936 Germany faced Scotland at Ibrox. The Germans had finished third at the second World Cup finals, staged in Italy two years previously. The home nations were yet to even acknowledge Jules Rimet existed. So these friendlies were literally test matches, bona fide arbiters of international football’s true power base.

At the end of that same season, nine of the Germany team Scotland struggled to defeat 2-0 in front of 50,000 would form the Breslau-elf – the Breslau Eleven – who, in another challenge match, provided the most significant victory in the history of the German national team outside only their 1954 World Cup win and their triumph at the 1972 Euros.

It’s a match still celebrated today and which I first learned of in Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger’s seminal English language story of German football, Tor! (WSC Books, 2002). Germany defeated Denmark 8-0 in a singular display of attacking guile and panache which marked their arrival as a footballing force in their own right.

The reason I mention the pride felt in this game by right-thinking, modern Germans – even old anti-establishment punks like Hesse-Lichtenberger – is the same reason you’re wondering where Breslau is. It’s now called Wroclaw, and it’s in Poland. At the time this game was played it was called Breslau and was part of Hitler’s “Greater Germany”.  

You know and I know this had almost nothing to do with the players. It would be a stretch to slate them for simply carrying on with their football careers as politics, always above their pay grade, carried on around them.

And, as you’re now probably remembering, England players of that era gave the Nazi salute in a Berlin friendly. It wasn’t just Germans who were forced to go along with a regime whose full evil would only be revealed over the next horrific decade.  

And so there is a picture of that day seven months earlier which clearly shows the swastika flying near the north-east corner of Ibrox, on a flag pole on the old enclosure roof opposite the Main Stand. Part knowing appeasement, part misguided manners, it was gestures like this that bought Britain just enough time to rearm sufficiently to keep Hitler at bay.

Yet I’ve seen modern day memes from rival fans, Rangers-haters, which promote this picture as Rangers “proudly” flying the swastika. It’s offered as conclusive proof of our fascist tendencies.

Forget it was a Scotland game and decorum demands, as it still does, the opposition’s national flag be flown at such games. Ignore the fact Rangers are simultaneously berated by the same internet trolls for fetishising the poppy, which remembers, among others, those who lost their life fighting the Nazis in the ensuing Second World War.

Never mind all the basic facts. Just feel the crassness of such an accusation, such a rank characterisation, in the pit of your stomach.

And now imagine it’s happening to your face rather than over the internet. Try to envisage how desperately alone you would feel if, unlike the Rangers support, you were part of a community vastly outnumbered by that from which your slanderer, your verbal assailant hails.

And then imagine, despite what the 1930s and 40s taught the world about where “othering” ends, no-one from government or law enforcement – not one third party source - is stepping in to stop the perpetrator.

Imagine a fucking referee lets him play on while your heart bleeds from the wound he’s inflicted.

It’s been a week of pathetically trying to imagine what it’s like to be Glen Kamara. It’s been a week of trying to do the impossible; trying to sympathise, as a white man soaked in my own privilege, with a 21^st century black man who has been racially abused, and trying not to make matters worse as a result.

I can’t do it. No-one white can. But we have to keep trying.

Last Saturday morning I recounted my earliest experience of racism – but only as a witness. This week a white cyber friend of mine, a West Brom fan who previously lived in Czechia and now resides in Slovakia, alerted me to a thread he’d begun on the One Touch Football chat room threads powered by When Saturday Comes. I joined him there to half-vent, half navel-gaze and just generally wonder where the fuck it all went wrong while, all around us, black football people – and black society – are trying to remember any time it ever went right.

I woke up last Friday to a Google notification from some Celtic website or news feed – a “Bhoys Blether”, “Celts Chat or “Hoops Haver” kinda thing – which, for some reason, saw fit to do a match report on the Rangers game of the previous evening.  Perhaps it was a reconnaissance mission ahead of the coming Old Firm match at Parkhead. But the dossier on their team’s next opponent consisted mainly of the words “shame” and “humiliation” and “violent”, liberally peppered with “disgraceful”.

Fair dues, I thought - at least they’ve called out the racism of Slavia Prague’s Ondřej Kúdela. But this report didn’t mention him. There was no reference whatsoever to the “incident” near the end of the game. They were simply referring to our two sendings-off and the fact the Slavia keeper, known for coming off his line too early, ended up with stitches to his face after a horrific clash with Kemar Roofe.

What, of course, this “report” was doing was reacting perversely to the fact there had been, the previous night, widespread media sympathy for an obviously distressed Rangers player. By rushing out a spiel on the game which didn’t even allow that one of our players felt he had been racially abused, they were proudly declaring they would never sympathise with a Rangers player, no matter the circumstance.

More disturbing, these Celtic hacks wanted any genuine hurt caused to a Rangers player to be scrubbed from history. Our centre-forward raising a boot too high and our centre-half picking up a second yellow for miscontrolling both the ball and his subsequent tackle, however – this was all proof of Rangers FC’s ongoing evil.

You wondered if they typed this up under a Xeroxed, grainy close-up of a roof over Ibrox in 1936, perhaps printed off and pinned to the wall above the Ikea Table of Truth upon which their Laptop of Purity rests. You wonder, basically, if they wrote their report under a billowing swastika.

Last Wednesday and Thursday I was blogging like an excited school boy about the intellectual beginnings and illustrious history of Slavia Prague. I eulogised their kit, I adored their stadium story - I called them a proud, proud club and genuinely lamented the fact I couldn’t see them in the flesh.

The flesh. Indeed.

A few days previously, still celebrating Rangers first title win in ten years, I wondered if anything could ever be done to repair my lost admiration for Rangers traditional top-tier rivals – the country’s other biggest clubs – after their fans and their boardrooms danced on our nascent grave in 2012.

By last Thursday night Slavia Prague had become the closest I will ever experience to hating a football club. I wished them only extinction. By Saturday, looking at a picture sent to the Gersnet WhatsApp group, I almost dissolved into tears to see Dundee United standing, literally pre-kick off v Aberdeen at Tannadice and symbolically with Glen Kamara.

Motherwell and, of course, on Sunday, Celtic too, also clearly took on board Connor Goldson’s distressingly frank interviews on Friday last. Taking the knee was now officially a token gesture.

Perhaps my genuine, post-2012 enmity with Scottish clubs I previously admired was dissolving. My life-long love affair with central European football history – one sealed with games attended and grounds visited in Czechia, Austria, Slovakia and Italy - was certainly turning more toxic than I could ever have expected.  

As Kudela withdrew from the Czechia squad travelling to Wales over the following international week, fearful of arrest for being the racist he is, Scotland welcomed Austria to Hampden a week after Slavia had stained Ibrox.

Any visit by Austria brings to mind their great Wunderteam, surprisingly beaten by Germany in that 1934 World Cup bronze medal match, of manager Hugo Meisl and global icon, the Paper Man himself, Matthias Sindelar. Both were born in towns now part of Czechia.

Once again, a week on from talking of Slavia’s 1938 success – a week on from delightedly posting pictures of Slavia’s 1938 Mitropa Cup-winning team - I was re-immersed in the world of inter-war, Mitteleuropa football - all Danubian derbies, intelligentsia versus workers and sepia-tinted glory. Now it felt soiled. Now it was horrible.

Twitter is perfectly matched to the lockdown mind-set – too agitated to sit still yet too disheartened to engage a long-term project. Yet I’d never previously been involved in a Twitter spat – not one that went beyond a half dozen posts anyway. But this week I went looking for one. I had to do something.

I saw another hardy Rangers soul interacting with a couple of Slavia fans, protesting on Kudela’s behalf in good English. This offered me the chance to somehow, pathetically, “stick up” for Glen Kamara and, who knows, if they were reasonable – one was a "travel blogger" after all! - also enjoy the knowledge not all Slavia fans were racist and I had, in fact, been overreacting to want their club as dead as so many wished mine in 2012.

A day’s back and forth saw these Czech Twitterers never once admit to any of the past proven cases of racism by their fans, slowly resort to calling all Rangers fans murderers because of a tragic death reported in salacious Old Firm terms by the tabloids through the week, and descend eventually into "hoping for more racism" in future games amid a one-way barrage of gifs laughing at the fact Rangers fans, as far as they were concerned, thought we could “solve” racism. 

Slavia fans are the subject of anti-Semitic chants by their domestic rivals. I knew this from Wikipedia. And the reason for these chants is itself horrifically anti-Semitic. I presume the editor of the Wiki page is a Slavia fan and perhaps something is lost in his use of a second language, but it seems more interested in pointing out Slavia fans are not Jewish than berating the anti-Semitic chants. The darkest part of the exchange was when I was basically told these chants justified Kudela racially abusing Glen Kamara.

You can never judge an entire fanbase by their Twitter warriors but, again, an infinitesimal hint of a whiff of a taste of what Glen Kamara must have felt when a man spat something in his ear and ran away because he knew it was evil.

No-one took the knee at Hampden this Thursday. The players all stood against racism and for Glen Kamara. The Wunderteam and First, Rapid and Austria Vienna’s Mitropa Cup successes of the 1920s and 30s were all restored to sentimental glory. Sindelar was the man who destroyed the Nazis on the pitch in his last ever international match.

But that’s no fucking help to Glen Kamara, is it. My temporary xenophobia was gone and my sickening xenophilia was restored? Wow. How does that help Glen, who probably listened last Friday as a BBC Scotland football pundit put all the pressure on him to prove what Kudela had said before re-framing the seminal moment a Scottish football team called out what they felt was a homophobic slur – a sound in Dingwall never proven not to be – as this Rangers team being a bunch of consistent liars.

In early January Michael Stewart sat on the Sportscene sofa and declared a stonewall (no pun intended) penalty and red card against Aberdeen to be unfair. The Aberdeen manager discussed it with the referee and publically concluded the correct decisions had been made. So what was Stewart's argument?

Simply that he, personally, didn’t like the rule. Suddenly.

Aberdeen lost to Rangers that day (we missed the penalty incidentally) and BBC Radio Scotland’s Sportsound did very well in so much of its racism discussions after last Thursday. But one wonders exactly how much proof Stewart will be satisfied with regarding what Kudela said to Rangers midfielder Glen Kamara.

In my Premiership title celebratory rantings I also laughed at the fact Rangers going from the top of Scottish football to the bottom and back again in the space of a decade would never be allowed to be the most romantic story in Scottish football. It took less than two weeks for me to be reminded we will, in fact, for so many over-invested, one-note observers, always need to be the most evil team in world football.

This extends to the need to wipe from history not only any good we do, but any undeniably evil behaviour towards us. Right now, somewhere, someone is twisting this last week into Rangers, the club who flew the swastika, also being the club who ended the taking of the knee. No context or explanation will be given. So we have to remember why and how.

But these are the loonballs. The nutbars. These are the permanently enraged and rarely engorged inadequates whose excesses contain their own defeat. Most Celtic fans have laughed off the swastika over Ibrox meme before it even hit a Rangers Twitter account. And we know what it’s like from the other side: We’ve all read or heard fellow Rangers fans linking the darker history of the Vatican with a guy at your work who hasn’t been to mass in decades but, well, supports a fitba team much the same size as ours.

Nah – they’re not the enemy. They’re not the kind of people who celebrate on your pitch then wait outside the tunnel for 45 minutes because they know they’ll be attacked if they go anywhere near the dressing rooms and they know they deserve it.
 
It’s the guys who scoff at the point of even fighting bigotry. Those using “woke” as a jibe, those insisting “it’s just the way things are” – those demanding hard proof of injustice far louder than they ever asked for its end, and whose sympathy depends on the colour of your shirt rather than, yup, the colour of your skin. They’re the ones you have to watch.

Sectarianism kills like racism. Nothing empowers both like pretending they’re just the norm. And nothing destroys the confidence of black players like knowing white men with a forum – be that a gif on Twitter, the microphone of a national broadcaster or the reigns of a famous Czech football club - feel no need to even try to stick up for them.

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.