by Hoop Blah »
17 Oct 2012 10:13
ZacNaloen The behaviour of the crowd as nothing to do with Racism IN football.
But haseverything to do with a society that is quite frankly out of touch with our values. However if it comes down to playing in our competitions the Serbian FA may have to get used to playing in empty stadiums at home as no one deserves to be treated like that.
The actions of their players getting violent and kicking and punching at black England players is something that UEFA does need to really need to look at, what was that all about, because it I don't believe it was just because Danny Rose kicked a ball at the crowd.
Good summary to be fair, although they weren't just kicking and punching black players, it was pretty indiscriminate from what I saw. There is a great picture in one of the papers (online version at least) of a middle age Serbian official seemingly headbutting one of our middle aged staff.
As you say, our values here are just different and we've done a lot in our society to move away from racism. Other parts of the world haven't and seemingly don't really want to. We, or FIFA and UEFA more to the point I suppose, need to decide if they want to make a stand on this issue and have all competing nations aligned to the same principles. Part of me thinks that we can't really expect everyone to think the same as us or run their countries in the same way and so we have to accept different types of abuse IF we're willing to compete against these countries.
Obviously UEFA and FIFA should be enforcing the rules they've stated and dragging these countries into line. But it's not really down to football to address political and social issues on such a grand scale. I can only see one way out for them at the moment, and that's some form of ban for Serbia (I don't even think behind closed doors games for 12 months would be a strong enough sanction).