http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/24679885

 

From Garth Crooks, and I quote:

 

"For Wenger to ask for further evidence is extraordinary given the fact that Yaya heard the evidence reported and his club have backed their captain on the night.

 

 

So it's extraordinary to want more evidence than what the one player in question heard? No wonder he was so quick to demonise JT and question anyone who wanted more evidence then.

 

 

I just don't understand what goes through the heads of people like Crooks. 

What you must remember is that Crooks is a nobody and the only way for him to stay in the media spotlight is to make stupid statements!

 

The best debate on it so far was by Adrian Durham (I know) on Talksh*t the other day who gave a ballanced view on whether it was booing or monkey chants, saying either could be confused with the other.

What you must remember is that Crooks is a nobody and the only way for him to stay in the media spotlight is to make stupid statements!

 

The best debate on it so far was by Adrian Durham (I know) on Talksh*t the other day who gave a ballanced view on whether it was booing or monkey chants, saying either could be confused with the other.

 

Exactly. Let's not forget the Chelsea fan that almost got in trouble only a couple of months ago because the media took a picture of him doing what they said were monkey gestures, but then further evidence shown that he was doing no such thing.

 

We need to look at as much evidence as possible before using the race card.

Edited October 26, 201312 yr by Scott Harris

I'm really starting to dislike some of the people associated with kick it out with their witchhunts and their 'I'm right because I said so and woe betide anyone who questions me' attitude.

 

Take the JT case. Presumption of innocence? Guilty. No witnesses? Guilty. Found not guilty in a court of law? Guilty.
 

They do their cause no credit at all.

Its quite sickening seeing certain people using racism to either get themselves in the limelight or keep themselves relevant.

Garth Crooks is a total disgrace. This is what he wrote in the Guardian after JT was acquitted:

 

 

If the FA don't act on the undisputed facts, and find Terry guilty of bringing the game into disrepute, a lot of good people are saying to me that there's no point in getting involved in the game at a senior level.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/13/john-terry-trial-fa

 

He actuallly said they must charge him and find him guilty. Not charge him and weigh up the evidence (as the court did), but charge him and find him guilty. If they don't, good people will walk away from the game.

 

He claimed that the facts of the case were undisputed. And yet a court of law had investigated and found the lack of any witnesses and the incomplete video clips and the inability of lipreading experts to agree on what was said made the evidence inconclusive, so it was not possible to find him guilty.

 

He's always been an utterly appalling pundit, but the way he talks on the issue of racism is just shocking. He - like Jason Roberts and other knee-jerk rent-a-quotes - seems pompously unaware of the damage he is doing.

Garth Crooks is a total disgrace. This is what he wrote in the Guardian after JT was acquitted:

He actuallly said they must charge him and find him guilty. Not charge him and weigh up the evidence (as the court did), but charge him and find him guilty. If they don't, good people will walk away from the game.

He claimed that the facts of the case were undisputed. And yet a court of law had investigated and found the lack of any witnesses and the incomplete video clips and the inability of lipreading experts to agree on what was said made the evidence inconclusive, so it was not possible to find him guilty.

He's always been an utterly appalling pundit, but the way he talks on the issue of racism is just shocking. He - like Jason Roberts and other knee-jerk rent-a-quotes - seems pompously unaware of the damage he is doing.

Good call re. Jason Roberts too. He's a boring pundit and not too bright imo.

This guy is just a w**ker full stop! If these are the kind of people that are supporting black players then god help em. Why does he feel the need to come crawling out the closet whenever the racism card is thrown and make big statements that quite frankly are alode of bollocks. Having a pop at managers that say they want more evidence other than just 1 guy and having a go at managers who think not turning up to a world isn't the right way to go about it. 

 

I really don't know how hard it is to take racist abuse from a section of about 50 fans but is it really any different to for example calling rooney ugly or calling rooney fat? Anyway I'm not going to go into all that sh*t but I can't help but feel a lot of journalists and "experts" want to just get there name out there and use the whole racism angle to do just that.

So by his reckoning any black person crying racism should just be believed immediately. Well that isn't open to abuse at all.

Duplicate post.

Edited October 26, 201312 yr by Spudulike

This was the case on Radio 5 this week - a representative of CSKA was interviewed and the presenter started from the basis that Toure was correct and the CSKA fans guilty. There was no acceptance on the part of the presenter that there should be an investigation first, before blame was assigned to CSKA. It winds me up tbh.

This was the case on Radio 5 this week - a representative of CSKA was interviewed and the presenter started from the basis that Toure was correct and the CSKA fans guilty. There was no acceptance on the part of the presenter that there should be an investigation first, before blame was assigned to CSKA. It winds me up tbh.

Tbf to the presenter if he dared to agree he would probably be breaking news on sky sports and jason roberts, clarke carlisle and co would be on the phone asking to be interviewed about the racist presenter on the bbc

Edited October 26, 201312 yr by Bluehatter

This was the case on Radio 5 this week - a representative of CSKA was interviewed and the presenter started from the basis that Toure was correct and the CSKA fans guilty. There was no acceptance on the part of the presenter that there should be an investigation first, before blame was assigned to CSKA. It winds me up tbh.

This reminds me of Dorset's post earlier this week on Henry Winter. Winter wrote that there was a massive outcry over alleged anti-Ferdinand chanting at an England game ("Build a bonfire..."), and there was huge criticism in all the press of the England fans for their alleged racism, and unsubtle digs that JT and Chelsea were to blame for turning the clock back etc. etc. Winter revealed that an exhaustive investigation by the FA and UEFA discovered that ONE fan had been heard to sing the song and the whole thing had been massively exaggerated by a hysterical media.

I was totally unaware of the outcome of the investigation, but noone was unaware of the over-the-top fuss that had been kicked up over nothing. And presumably the average newspaper reader is of the belief that there was widespread racial abuse of the Ferdinands and that it was all instigated by racist Chelsea fans egged on by the disgraced ex-England captain.

They understandably have a large thread about the racism in the Moscow game on Bluemoon, but a Russian guy signed up to post a very interesting perspective on it.  Just thought I'd share it here.

 

I am from Russia. First of all, I'd like to post a sincere disclaimer: 1) I am not a CSKA fan, 2) I'd be happy if all of our clubs are banned from Europe until this is sorted. 3) Please don't take any of this personally, my writing style is bold and maybe aggressive only for the sake of clarity. 4) I am, much more than many of you, sick and tired of racism and homophobia that's gathering strenght now in Russia. But, as I'm about to elaborate, it's not a reflection of the Russian people and the Russian culture - it's a childish, primitive reaction of an angry and lost generation that's ready to hate anything and anyone. It's a social problem that's here and now, that has no history, but might have a future if nothing is done. 

Every time I see something like this happen and the reaction that follows, I want to explain the true underlying reasons for this, to maybe provide a little insight into why all this is actually happening. I will not try to justify whatever happened and will happen, but rather provide a possible deeper explanation for those of you who might be interested. Since I don't have a popular blog or any other meaningful way of posting what I'm about to post, I've decided to use the Man City situation and post here. So please don't take it personally, I am as unbiased as can be about this issue. 

The problem of racism is a complex issue. But when the West says that racism is ingrained deeply in the Russian culture, or that we have a backwards society in this respect, this is simply not true. Russia never had overseas colonies that it exploited, never had black slaves and never had overt govertment-endorsed racism, like most of the West. Thus the very notion of racism never even existed in Russia until recently. It is your guilt that you're so ashamed of and that you want to wash away by being so anti-racist now. The Russian people have absolutely no history with the black race, whereas only some 50-60 years ago there was open, official racism in all the former Western colonial powers. Your ancestors killed, tortured, raped and traded millions of black people for several centuries. Now, all of a sudden, everyone is so enlightened, everyone is so loving and caring towards all the minorities that were oppresed for centuries. What a marvellous transformation! And I applaud Western society for realizing their mistakes and sorting themselves out. I can only envy this. But you're sorting a problem you yourselves created. And then imported into Eastern Europe. My parents and my grandparents had absolutely NO clue that the concept of racism even existed. They didn't even know that you can hate a black person because he's black. Sure, we never had many black people so most people found them strange, foreign and were naturally curious. That's a normal reaction to something you had no knowledge of. But there were tens of thousands of foreign black students studying in the Soviet Union (at the same time when black people weren't even allowed in many Western universities), many of them stayed and had families and were treated with respect. The vast majority of them have fond memories of this that they cherish. Maybe they were not assimilated and integrated fully, but no one ever abused or discriminated against them. One of Peter the Great's closest aids/advisors was black, and our greatest poet, Pushkin, was a direct descendant of a black person. We have very little history with the black race, like I said, but what little we do have, is largely positive and friendly. Furthermore, by and large, we've always lived peacefully and in a friendly neighborly manner with the thousands of nations and peoples of Russia. For centuries we've lived happily with Tatars (who are muslim, by the way; by now no one even notices if someone is Tatar or Russian, it's all mixed), thousands of Siberian tribes, just to give an example. 

Now, come fall of the Soviet Union, the overwhelming social confusion, the lost generation etc. etc. - and we get what we get. It's wrong and it's ugly, but it's nothing more than a childish reaction to an imported problem. These young people that chant, they weren't born racist, we didn't teach them to be racist - not more than 20 years ago they DISCOVERED from the West that you can actually, among many other bad things, also be racist and hate black people. It's meaningless to them, they just want to hate everything. If all of a sudden it becomes cool to hate the color yellow (and the West starts defending the color yellow and every waking hour pointing their fingers at us for abusing the color yellow) - they'll hate it just as much. We do not have any kind of history of racism. We've never ever had black people on our soil (until recently), because we never had slaves, we never brought them in against their will, like you did. We're not guilty of anything so we don't have to be sorry now, we don't have to care about how they feel because we never had anything to do with them feeling bad in the first place. They're alien to us, for better or worse, so the lowlives naturally react to that in the only way they know: abuse. Again, they're angry and they're lost and they suddenly have nothing to fall back on. The continuity has been broken. For all the hate the Soviet Union gets, there was at least one good thing about it: a decent, caring, educated society that's ready to help each other and that was always open to everyone. And I mean ordinary people. Right now in Russia, there's just a total lack of respect for anything and anyone. Look, we don't even respect each other. We abuse each other much much more than these fans abused a black person. Sorry for my cynicism (just to paint a picture), but all Yaya got were monkey chants, while these same "fans" then left the stadium and probably beat some white guy with a baseball bat. It's logical that if we don't even respect each other, we won't respect black people. Sure, we have many problems actually ingrained in our culture. Corruption, for example. The tendecy to bypass/distrust written law in favor of striking a deal ("a human/personal approach"). But racism isn't one of them. It's a current social problem that's a result of a total vacuum of any kind of... social education and social maturity. 

It took you centuries to go from overt oppression and exploitation to respect. We've had less than 20 years to deal with this. With living in an open multiracial, multicultural world. Give the country some time to adjust. 

Again, thank you for your attention, I meant no offense. Just wanted to explain this as best as I could.

 

 

Thanks for posting that Castiel. It is an insightful perspective on modern day Russia. Not a lot of horse-sense* coming out of the CSKA heirarchy at present concerning the incident though. To accuse the british media of an on-going conspiracy to smear russian football is unnecessary hyperbole. As is Toure's call for black players to boycott 2018. I expect that should UEFA find that Toure's allegations are substantiated then CSKA may well miss out on quite a bit of match revenue in games ahead.

 

 

*   couldn't resist

I think the notion that Russian people have 'learnt' racism from the west a little far fetched really. He contradicts himself really, saying that the Soviet Union was so much more tolerant, and that their society was more tolerant. If this really was the case, as a society they would reject any influences that suggest otherwise.

 

If you want to see another example of the tolerance of their society, look at the amount of, and severity of the homophobia. Russia might not have only had a black population until relatively recent, but presumably they're always had gay people.

I think the notion that Russian people have 'learnt' racism from the west a little far fetched really. He contradicts himself really, saying that the Soviet Union was so much more tolerant, and that their society was more tolerant. If this really was the case, as a society they would reject any influences that suggest otherwise.

 

If you want to see another example of the tolerance of their society, look at the amount of, and severity of the homophobia. Russia might not have only had a black population until relatively recent, but presumably they're always had gay people.

 

He goes on to elaborate that he doesn't mean Russia's history is all rainbows and lollipops, because it clearly isn't.  But the Soviet Union erased the Russian national identity for secular totalitarian communism, and as a result the latest generation of Russians don't have anything to hang on to.  The Soviets are gone and they pretty much erased what came before (in the way of national identity and tradition) so you have a society with few values and a lot of anger.  He said that a lot of Russians are turning back to religion as a reverse from Soviet secularism.  That's the cliffnotes of his explanation anyway, their whole society is mixed up and angry - not just at blacks or homosexuals, but anyone, even each other.  His point is that there is no history of racism in Russia as the media are painting, but there is an enormous history of it in the west.

 

He does have a point in saying that Russians had nothing to do with the subjugation of black people, for all they are guilty of they never treated another race of people as "sub-human".  That's entirely on the 'enlightened' west.  Everybody was equally oppressed under the Soviets!  He also says that as a throwback from the enormous control the government once had, now there is absolute freedom of speech in Russia to an almost twisted degree.  You can say whatever you want, no matter how offensive it is.  Political correctness apparently doesn't exist there, which is going to clash with what we expect at football matches.   

He came across to me as somebody trying to shift responsibility for what is happening in Russia and Eastern Europe right now to the evil West. He's right that our history of black slavery is shameful but Russia has quite history for slavery too (just not black ones, so that's not as bad?). And if what he says about racism being a purely Western concept that spread to the east then I would say it only goes to show how far we have come in the last 20 odd years.

 

It's a shame but understandable that whenever there is any mention of the R-word now in football it's met with a great deal of cynicism, at least outside of popular media. Garth Crooks and his cronies are largely responsible for this; after the Roy Hodgson/monkey thing it's impossible to take them seriously. If they truly care about their cause the they should learn to shut the f**k up. UEFA have already opened an investigation to look into Yaya Toure's complaints so there really is no need for them to get involved.

 

 

This guy is just a w**ker full stop! If these are the kind of people that are supporting black players then god help em. Why does he feel the need to come crawling out the closet whenever the racism card is thrown and make big statements that quite frankly are alode of bollocks. Having a pop at managers that say they want more evidence other than just 1 guy and having a go at managers who think not turning up to a world isn't the right way to go about it. 

 

I really don't know how hard it is to take racist abuse from a section of about 50 fans but is it really any different to for example calling rooney ugly or calling rooney fat? Anyway I'm not going to go into all that sh*t but I can't help but feel a lot of journalists and "experts" want to just get there name out there and use the whole racism angle to do just that.

 

If you can't see the difference between calling somebody a black bar steward and calling them a fat bar steward then you need to read some history books.

I think one of the points I took from the Russian's comments was that we in the West haven't really solved the issue of racism ourselves. Can we really say we have? Thanks to the Jason Roberts of this world the anti-racism campaign in football is probably doing more harm than good as we are fed up with the constant over reaction.

You could say that Russia is where the Uk was in terms of racism in football 30 years ago. It'll need the time we've taken to get to grips with the issue.

Similarly, it was illegal to be gay in the Uk a little over 40 years ago - not a long period of time.

He came across to me as somebody trying to shift responsibility for what is happening in Russia and Eastern Europe right now to the evil West. He's right that our history of black slavery is shameful but Russia has quite history for slavery too (just not black ones, so that's not as bad?). And if what he says about racism being a purely Western concept that spread to the east then I would say it only goes to show how far we have come in the last 20 odd years.

 

It's a shame but understandable that whenever there is any mention of the R-word now in football it's met with a great deal of cynicism, at least outside of popular media. Garth Crooks and his cronies are largely responsible for this; after the Roy Hodgson/monkey thing it's impossible to take them seriously. If they truly care about their cause the they should learn to shut the f**k up. UEFA have already opened an investigation to look into Yaya Toure's complaints so there really is no need for them to get involved.

 

 

 

If you can't see the difference between calling somebody a black bar steward and calling them a fat bar steward then you need to read some history books.

 

Or perhaps you could look at it another way, in my opinion, in order for the racism problem to go away I think that other races need to stop being so protected, how can you get a sense of equality when you have to walk on eggshells when talking about something that's race related? For me, that's not equality. As long as there's people that constantly bring up history books and what happened a hundred years ago how can they be fully integrated?

He does have a point in saying that Russians had nothing to do with the subjugation of black people, for all they are guilty of they never treated another race of people as "sub-human".  That's entirely on the 'enlightened' west.  Everybody was equally oppressed under the Soviets!  He also says that as a throwback from the enormous control the government once had, now there is absolute freedom of speech in Russia to an almost twisted degree.  You can say whatever you want, no matter how offensive it is.  Political correctness apparently doesn't exist there, which is going to clash with what we expect at football matches.   

 

Even so the author has a pretty rose-tinted recollection of Russian history. Saying "the very notion of racism never even existed in Russia until recently" is an absurd statement, in light of the numerous pogroms against Jews and the historic treatment of/attitude towards other ethnic minority groups in Russia like Ukrainians, Cossacks, Chechans and so on.

Or perhaps you could look at it another way, in my opinion, in order for the racism problem to go away I think that other races need to stop being so protected, how can you get a sense of equality when you have to walk on eggshells when talking about something that's race related? For me, that's not equality. As long as there's people that constantly bring up history books and what happened a hundred years ago how can they be fully integrated?

 

I kind of agree about equal treatment but that line of reasoning is something I'm seeing trotted out more and more and it's complete bollocks; is it really "walking on eggshells" remembering not to call somebody a black bar steward or a ni**er, or any other racial slur? It shouldn't even occur to a normal person and if you can't help yourself then there's something wrong with you. The same goes for the monkey chants at football matches. This isn't directed at you personally but more at an amalgam of people on here and other places who keep coming out with stuff like that. The Roy Hodgson/monkey thing was different because pretty much all sensible people agreed that that was a ridiculous situation and Kick it Out lost most of what little credibility they had left.

 

Bloody hell, we as white males in the modern world we really have things tough!

Even so the author has a pretty rose-tinted recollection of Russian history. Saying "the very notion of racism never even existed in Russia until recently" is an absurd statement, in light of the numerous pogroms against Jews and the historic treatment of/attitude towards other ethnic minority groups in Russia like Ukrainians, Cossacks, Chechans and so on.

That's what I came in to say, there may not have been racism against blacks but there has been plenty against many many minorities.

Garth Crooks is a nonentity.

 

...Not in terms of mass, but you get my point.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/24679885

 

From Garth Crooks, and I quote:

 

 

 

 

So it's extraordinary to want more evidence than what the one player in question heard? No wonder he was so quick to demonise JT and question anyone who wanted more evidence then.

 

 

I just don't understand what goes through the heads of people like Crooks. 

Well in his case food, and plenty of it .