Millwall Beauty Queens Parade for Police Five
Twitter is a good place to avoid today for Leeds fans – or indeed for anyone whose idea of good taste precludes taunting rival supporters over two bloody murders thirteen years ago. Millwall fans are generally the exception to the rules of taste though, as they are to most rules – not excluding those governing grammar, basic hygiene and indeed evolution.
It’s not hard to find Millwall fans on Twitter today. Those of this dismal fraternity who are able to find their way around a computer are there in the ether, in force, to celebrate the first of Millwall’s two cup finals this season. Their team face Leeds United, the cause of all those chips on rival fans’ shoulders everywhere. The effect is accentuated with Millwall fans, for whom the chip on the shoulder invariably possesses a higher IQ than the diseased organ inside the skull.
It’s pointless to regale you here with the output of the South Bermondsey twitterati. It’s all there, for those who might want to source it. Hashtag #sickeningbile might be a useful route to go. Strong stomachs are required; this is no place for the queasy. Youngsters who weren’t even born when Chris Loftus and Kevin Speight met their awful fate in Taksim Square Istanbul, are gleefully evident, aping their elders, glorying in the blood spilled by two lads who went overseas to watch a football match – and never came home.
Most football clubs suffer from a minority of this sort, people who genuinely seek approval for dragging their very souls through the gutter as they seek to out-do each other in aiming jibes at the misfortunes of others. It’s been a blight on football for over 50 years, certainly since the time of the Munich Air Disaster. Man U fans are only too well aware of the fashion down the years for tasteless chants and songs on that sad subject. My own Leeds United have shameful form for it; Liverpool too and various other clubs. Man U fans will climb on their high horse a few times every year over this, but they are not without sin, reveling in their own sick celebration over Hillsborough and Istanbul, plumbing the depths over the Heysel tragedy. It’s hard to find a club that doesn’t attract a lunatic fringe of this kind of “support” – but it’s usually a minority and it’s been greatly reduced in recent years. Only Millwall buck this trend. There it’s most of them, most of the time. There, civilised behaviour and rules of taste and respect seemingly don’t apply.
Millwall fans, rather than condemning the examples of pond-life in their midst, tend to glory in them. “No-one likes us, we don’t care” they sing defiantly, happy with their grisly reputation, proud of a record that would sicken a psychopath. They’re more famous of course for their tendency towards violence, usually in gangs of herd-instinct cowards seeking small groups of rival fans to attack. When none such are available, they will be content to fight among themselves and disgrace the game in this country that way. They had a set-to at Wembley last April in the FA Cup semi-final. Bewildered Wigan fans looked on as their team cruised to victory and the Millwall animals tore into each other like sharks drunk on blood. Images of crying children caught up between bloodied “adults” lacing into their own kind shocked and revolted the nation. As usual, nothing effective was done.
It’s about time, though, that something was done. Millwall is the land that time forgot, a throwback to an uglier era that the rest of the game is doing reasonably well in leaving behind. Only at Millwall does this anti-culture still flourish, by word and by deed. In Leeds, the old men of the sixties and seventies Service Crew sit around swapping stories on internet forums these days, their boots hung up for good. Even West Ham fans are emerging from their own savage past. Man U fans are too busy travelling up and down between Devon and the Theatre of Hollow Myths to engage in fisticuffs – they’re an aging population too.
The modern football fan is a relatively peaceful person, obsessed with the media fishbowl of the Premier League, horrified by the price of everything, as likely as not to be a student, or a female; a far cry from the working man’s army of previous decades. Not so at Millwall. Millwall defies evolution, laughs at progress, dismisses a family atmosphere as “soft”, spouts poison on the internet, looks for easy targets down scary back-alleys. Millwall is the past in defiance of the present and the future. Millwall should be consigned to that past, to the dustbin of football history – and their shrinking legion of “fans” left to lob half-bricks at each other.
It’s high time to get rid of Millwall.
PS – see below for the evidence of one Millwall cretin glorying in his following the Twitter account of Turkish murderer Ali Umit Demir. Disgusting – but we shouldn’t apply normal human standards to some Millwall apes.
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