Cod Almighty | Diary

Can you Leyton Orient fans stop bleating about losing your club and understand the real problem: Arsenal have lost a football match

9 March 2017

Thursday's diary is often a composite of stray ideas being kicked around Cod Almighty Towers. The tale of how Vancouver Whitecaps denied Grimsby a place in the top flight will have to wait. As it involves accusations of perfidy in South Yorkshire, a couple of members of the CA team will need to find safe houses first.

News is in short supply. Middle-Aged Diary is happy to give one last plug to the fans' forum at McMenemy's tonight. And Marcus Bignot would quite like Town not to lose their next two games. Well, yes; had he said he was going to play our youth team in solidarity with Orient, that would have been news.

Still more astonishing than that would have been is an interview with the chief executive of a football club, one who speaks articulately and with respect for fans. Imagine this coming from the lips of Shaun Harvey or Katrien Meire:

If you allow football clubs to become separated from their fan base then you do get the kind of issues that are being reported. I see fans with these 'Against Modern Football' banners. I don’t buy that. It’s each individual club’s responsibility to make sure that fans embrace modern football. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.

Brighton & Hove Albion are the club lucky enough to have a CEO – Paul Barber – who understands you can modernise a club without deliberately setting out to alienate your existing supporters. Read the interview in full. You'll learn more from him than you will from me, and as Brighton are a club who had little choice but to build a new ground, I hope that someone at Blundell Park is taking note.

Even the point about 'Against Modern Football' is a point well made. The most toe-curling examples of fan misbehaviour nowadays come from people nostalgic for a past that never existed, people who think different rules apply when you are in a football crowd, who think they have licence.

When I started going back to football in the late 1980s after my student years, racist chanting was shamefully common. But what was unimaginable was a chant of "We're racist, we're racist, we're racist, and that's the way we like it." It was reported that Chelsea fans were singing that on the Paris Metro two years ago. The people convicted as a result of that incident included a police officer, someone with a job in finance, and a civil engineer. People with education, in other words. You can imagine their faces as they sing their vile chant: the knowing smiles, as though they were being ironic, post-modern. Nothing ironic about pushing a black passenger out of a carriage though.

You still get complaints that present-day sensibilities – not being rude about people with different skin colours, religions, genders or sexualities – are a ploy to stop people having fun at football. Yesterday, Irregular Diary reflected on the increasing diversity of Town supporters over the 24 years she has been a fan. But if we haven't had fun over the last couple of years, it's not been because we're scared of offending the woman sitting two seats away; it's because Paul Hurst has just brought on Danny Parslow.