First, a confession. I was not happy with the score after ninety
minutes at Anfield last Sunday. I was not happy with the referee. I was
not happy with those aspects of the universe that came together, and
conspired against me and the team I support.
It was 12.30am on the Australian East Coast when the match between
Liverpool and Manchester United finished and, as you might have
gathered, I was not happy. In my semi-conscious state, halfway between a
dream and the blindingly green glow of the television in the dark, it
would have been only too easy for me to open up Twitter and spew forth a
stream of fury and vitriol, making some brutal reference to the
referee’s medical history and having a go at Alex Ferguson because he’s
got an old man’s face. Rather, I noted that I quite liked Suso’s hair,
replied to a few words of encouragement with ‘Pfff’, and went to bed.
Some people had more of an opportunity to think clearly – not
everyone watches the Premier League at midnight – and chose to do
something altogether different to myself. You’ve likely seen the results
of these explosions of inexplicable malevolence. ‘God forgive me for
saying this but I hope that cancer comes back and does its job on Mark
Halsey this time,’ said one particularly aggrieved Liverpool supporter.
‘Fuck off Mark Halsey I hope your mum gets cancer,’ wrote another. It’s
not nice, is it?
I wasn’t so sure that Glen Johnson tackling his own goalkeeper was
worthy of a penalty, and Jonjo Shelvey may not have been sent off had
the referee seen the incident in super-slow motion from an angle that he
couldn’t possibly have had access to under the current laws of the
game, but it takes a different kind of beast to take these seeming
injustices and use them as a cover for wishing cancer on a man.
I am in no position to speculate on the precise nature of fandom 20,
40 or 50 years ago, but the advent of social media as it exists today
has given birth to an entirely new type of supporter; one which can hide
behind the Internet, which I understand to be pretty wide, but awfully
thin. It’s a veil that also allows people to be angrier, it seems,
though this anger too often spills over into real life, where there are
actual trees and actual clouds and actual people with actual emotions,
and actual children who actually hear the vile things that people say.
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