Quote:
Originally Posted by Heinze
Well I'll tell you something, it was probably the most blatant episode I'd seen at a major English club game in many a year. In that bad old days of the 1970s and 80s scenes like that were frequent but a quarter of a century later it was an unplesant suprise. It wasn’t just one or two, sadly there were a significant number of fans doing it. Over the past few years ive been to many games in England wearing an Ireland top (including one last weekend) and never heard any anti-Irish abuse. At the vast majority of the games ive been to there has been at least one Irishman on the field or bench etc, and again there has been no anti-Irish chants. Similarly when watching games on live TV involving Irish players (eg Sunderland, Wigan to name recent examples) ive not heard anything similar.
In my opinion what they were chanting and doing was close to crossing the line of racial abuse. Their chants were clearly audible and it certainly didn’t cast your club in a good light. I accept that there are many Man Utd fans who are decent people (and conversely there are sections of other teams fans who have bad attitudes too), but on that nights evidence there seemed to be a major anti-Irish problem.
