Is Chanting A Price Worth Paying For Peace?

Dr John Coulter ✍ There’s been one heck of a hullaballoo about the recent sectarian chanting from some Shamrock Rovers fans at Windsor Park during the European match with Larne - but at least the game was played!

Gone are the days when the Northern Ireland male soccer squad had to play its ‘home’ games in England because of the Troubles.

Abusive chanting may have taken place last month at Windsor Park, but at least its wasn’t a Troubles-style, full-scale riot as Northern Ireland has witnessed over the decades.

This prompts the very contentious question - is it better to tolerate bursts of sectarian chanting rather than risk serious physical crowd trouble resulting in games having to be abandoned, played behind closed doors, or even transferred to other grounds outside Northern Ireland?

Of course, the woke community and society’s latte-sipping liberal elite will immediately chime in that no abusive chanting of any kind should be tolerated at any sporting events.

Soccer always seems to get a bad reputation for chanting because of the football hooliganism image it gained in the latter decades of the last century. Even today, some clubs have to endure the name of having a hard core of supporters who like to indulge in chanting and banners.

However, are we as a society missing the big picture - that sporting rivalries are part of human nature. Whilst people may point to the traditional Old Firm games over the generations between Glasgow soccer rivals, Rangers and Celtic, surely there are many, many more examples of how heated sporting events can enflame passions.

Sticking with Scottish football, what about the rivalries between Dundee and Dundee United, or Hearts and Hibernian in Edinburgh? Travel south of the Scottish border to England and north London, what about the rivalry between my beloved Gunners and Spurs. Then there’s the Manchester and Merseyside derbies.

As a life-long Gunner, I’ll openly admit to taunting Spurs fans both in person and online. And chums who are Leeds fans have not been behind a wall in reminding me as a Gunner how their team defeated my beloved Arsenal in the 1972 English FA Cup final!

When the referee’s whistle goes to signal the start of a sporting event, it can trigger raw emotions in us as human beings. I have one chum that I regard as a brilliant academic. Yet put him in a crowd at a soccer match and sound that whistle, he becomes a baying woof! Likewise, when the referee blows the whistle for the end of the match, he returns to his normal, mature, academic self!

Surely each sport has its moments when passions run wild and even overflow. I even remember in my junior reporting days hearing of a fight between players after a church indoor bowls match!

By chance, I recently had the pleasure of attending a Saturday morning match between two junior sides.

The plentiful cursing and swearing was loud, yellow and red cards flowed, some cracker goals, a sending-off, and there was even a punch-up - and that was just among the players!

And then everyone went home calm! Tempers, tantrums and sport - now there’s a potentially dangerous concoction.

Some folk like to compare the behaviour of some soccer fans to the conditions at rugby matches where the latter has integrated mixing of fans and alcohol available at grounds.

While the segregation issue may not be a problem at rugby matches, is anyone daring to suggest there has never been inappropriate chanting at such games?

Likewise, some of the most brutal contact sports are ice hockey, boxing and wrestling. In some cases, the play on the rink or in the ring can cause the crowd to be wound up to fever pitch.

I am of an age when I could remember Saturday afternoon wrestling on ITV before the football results. That sport had stars, such as Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks, Kung Foo, Mick McManus, and Kendo Nagasaki.

I’ve sat in the homes of born again Christians who almost climbed into their TV sets, baying for the blood of opponents during that mad hour before the calmness of the soccer results.

Indeed, I can even remember as a young Boys’ Brigade member at summer camp in Southport in 1975 attending the mid-week wrestling when Giant Haystacks was on the bill that evening.

We heaped verbal abuse on Haystacks to such a point that he came out of the ring and made towards us! Or maybe it was just part of his act? After the chanting, it was back to the main marquee for the evening spiritual epilogue for us Christian BB lads!

Returning to soccer, fans will sing inappropriate songs and chants at times about the referee, opposing teams and players.

Whilst such singing and chanting is part of the sport, indeed many sports, in terms of ‘letting off steam’, the line has to be drawn when the lyrics include racist, homophobic or transphobic remarks.

In reality, given human nature, can we ever 100 per cent rid sport of inappropriate singing or chanting? No matter what the event, there will always be that one individual who lets their emotions run amok and shouts the horrendous remark.

The bitter medicine that we may have to swallow as a society is that it is better to let some fans hurl sectarian abuse rather than them hurl bottles and bricks. Indeed, to try and clamp down on sectarian chanting may only encourage some to indulge in it as a mark of rebellion.

Are some folk too easily offended? Are we trying to create too woke a society? Does society need a law defining what constitutes inappropriate songs and chanting at sporting events?

I’ll end my column on very, very thin ice. What happens, as a society, if we become so draconian in our marshalling of sporting events in terms of singing and chanting that we take the fun out of attending those events because we have to sit in silence?

Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM.