Poznan, November 1991: my first away match with England, the final qualifying game for Euro 92. Avoid defeat and England were heading for Sweden; lose and the Republic of Ireland would take our place by winning in Turkey. In the opening minutes a small pocket of Irish fans, unable to make it to Istanbul, started a chant in support of Jack Charlton’s side from the neighbouring home section. The response of the English around me was immediate and definitive in its misjudgment: “No surrender, no surrender, no surrender to the IRA – scum!”
I had heard the song, to the modern hymn tune of Give Me Joy In My Heart (Sing Hosanna!), often enough at Wembley, its relevance to a game against, say, Albania perplexing enough. But here Charlton’s assortment of homegrown players infused with English– and Scottish-born grandchildren were being effortlessly conflated with terrorists. And so it has gone on, and still goes on, and reached a renewed peak at Celtic Park on Tuesday.
After a first half played out in large part to the chant “Fuck the IRA”, the FA intervened and stopped the England fans’ band from beating out the rhythm. In fairness, the tune in question is common enough and first stuck in my head a decade ago, when the Euro 2004 hosts used it for “Portugal Ole”. The lyrics “Follow England Away” are squeezed into its metre, which is what the band thought they were playing. However, after what felt like 10 minutes it must surely have dawned on them that the words had been changed, unless they too have been deafened by their playing down the years.
Anyway, this is just a fresh wrinkle on an all too familiar theme. I only heard one voice, in the gents pre-match, try out: “UDA, On our way, Fuck the pope and the IRA.” It is 14 years since a man wearing an “SAS – Gotcha on the Rock” shirt, in reference to the Gibraltar incident of 1988, was in a chorus of “Could you go a Chicken Supper, Bobby Sands?” outside the Germany game at Euro 2000. But “No surrender”, as well as its own song, is inserted at the end of the third line of the national anthem by the many for whom the Good Friday agreement never happened.
On Tuesday, England’s politically minded supporters were so consumed by their considered views on the Troubles that their other staple subject-matter, the second world war, did not get a look-in. This takes its most childish form with the green-bottles rip-off “Ten German Bombers”, but also includes chanting “Where were you in world war two?” at former allies (I first heard it in Poland in 1991), or “If it wasn’t for the English you’d be Krauts”, which is sung frequently enough and I have also heard muttered, matter-of-factly, to a Belgian barman going about his business.
One question arises from this that would require considerable research to answer: is England’s support disproportionately comprised of servicemen and their families? One such individual with the army in his blood told me of his reservations about going to the 2006 World Cup in Germany because he could not separate those his father fought against from the Germans of today. Then again, a left-leaning, Arsenal supporting senior colleague habitually called Jens Lehmann “the Nazi” and cited the bombing of his grandparents as reason enough when challenged. You can find an endorsement of the Bobby Sands song in a blogpost on the Spectator website, while the late Alan Clark offered support to the martial instincts of hooligans in the 90s. Xenophobia takes different forms but is to hand in all walks of life.
All the while, there is an important truth unacknowledged by foreign hooligans and authorities alike: the days when English football fans, whether following country or club, were a certain or even likely source of general disorder are long gone. Everton fans in Lille recently saw the continuing legacy of English hooliganism’s bad old days, in the shape of unprovoked attacks by local thugs and then the French police.
The attitudes of England fans to Ireland are worrying, with June’s friendly in the Republic looming. This is not the England support of 1995, though, when our last trip to Dublin had to be abandoned during the first half as missiles poured from the Lansdowne Road stands. Look at incidents across Europe, such as the Serbia v Albania fiasco and the suspension of Italy v Croatia, and you realise that there are far worse things in football than foolish English chants.
But it didn’t take the youth wearing a cap under a hood, with a scarf covering his face, in the queue at Celtic Park to remind me that there can be a lurking sense of menace. When you find a foreign pub taken over by English fans and their flags, and the national anthem being belted out, you know it is sensible to find somewhere else; you also wonder how these same fans would react were supporters of another country to behave the same way in the West End before a match at Wembley.
The way forward, still, is more of the same measures that have got us this far: banning orders including suspending passports around match time of those who are violent around games, criminal-record checks on those buying away tickets from the FA, and encouragement of a more diverse support (easier for a finals in France than a Sunday night in Estonia or a Tuesday in Glasgow).
The FA were right to stop the band playing that tune on Tuesday but too little is done at Wembley to root out the political.
You should not overreact to Tuesday night’s singing, however mindless. And those of us who take an internationalist, rather than nationalist, approach to following England should carry on, immersing ourselves in tournaments and expanding proud collections of improbably random holiday destinations: Vaduz, Poznan, Tirana, Donetsk, Bloemfontein, Gelsenkirchen, Tallinn, San Marino, Bratislava … even Glasgow.
