Cod Almighty | Diary

3 September 2018

Open Diary writes: It hasn't quite been the start to the season we expected in so many ways.

On the playing side of things, we find ourselves pretty much where we were this time last year and the year before. I remember going to the away matches at Wycombe and Colchester the season after we came up – and we were as 'disappointing' then as it seems Michael Jolley thinks we were on Saturday. Some will argue that this is the result of unreasonable expectations, but to me it was more a case of exaggerated hopes, at least on my part. I did really think we would get off to a good start.

On the other hand, I can quite see why there are people advocating patience and a more positive outlook. The players who have been brought in are younger, have a better pedigree and appear to have more potential than those brought in in previous seasons. Is it like the Buckley side in 1997 where the team took time to gel? Maybe that's how it will work out this time.

But more worrying are the current social media and messageboard exchanges on the subject of racist words used in the stands, and the way those who witness it deal with it. It's yet another thing I don't get about the modern world. It is 2018 after all, and you would have thought that by now everyone would have got the message that you just don't do these things?

In the 1960s there was a TV programme called The Black and White Minstrel Show. It was all part of the hangover from the 1950s when we had Miss World competitions and DH Lawrence books were banned. The BBC used to refuse to play songs with so-called raunchy lyrics. Pan's People gyrated every week on Top of the Pops. But then the penny dropped, and in the 1970s it was all swept away – or so I thought until the other week, when it reappeared in the crowd at Newport.

It was a bit like learning that one of those terrible 1960s diseases like smallpox, polio or scarlet fever had surfaced again after we'd all been told they had been eradicated. People of my age were inoculated against them in mass programmes – I remember everyone at school going to this mobile X-ray unit parked in the car park in Yarra Road (where the library is now) so that we could all be tested for TB. Someone jabbed this six-pronged device into your forearm to see if you were immune to it. When they found you weren't, which applied to most people, you got this nasty injection to prevent you succumbing to it in future.

Now it seems that there are people who need to be reminded that using outdated racist language is a bit like reintroducing smallpox or polio to the world. It's bringing back something that most people thought was gone for good, and which you generally don't find anywhere else in the civilised world.

Then you realise that we are all victims of the people who say these things. If you realise that someone else is showing all the signs of smallpox or whatever, it's not "grassing" if you call the doctor or an ambulance. It's actually just like preventing the re-emergence of a killer disease into society. So, reporting the use of racist terms at a football ground to a steward or the police is how you deal with it.

Unfortunately, when you look at the messageboards, you realise that there is a little clique of people who don't share this view and they either excuse or minimise it as "banter" or justify it as "free speech". Again, unfortunately, these are people who would be better for not being associated with the club. If the club can identify them then it would be good idea for them to be banned, but it would be an awful lot better if they realised that their views and language should be relegated to the dustbin of history where they belong and they went away of their own volition.