Football Fans - Gone Too Far?

Players throughout the leagues will be secretly congratulating Paul Connolly after the Crawley Town defender reacted to provocation from Brentford fans at Griffin Park.



Paul Connolly, the Crawley Town full-back, described it as “handbags”. When it comes to view what happened, the Football Association might be less dismissive.
On Tuesday, in his team’s Sky Bet League One game against Brentford at Griffin Park, in order to take a throw-in Connolly went to retrieve the ball which had been hoofed into the crowd. Someone hurled it back at him with a vigour that evidently annoyed him. He approached the thrower and, judging from the shaky video footage circulating on the internet, slapped the man in the face.
As the stand erupted, as stewards and police struggled to restore some sort of order, the referee took no action. That pleased the Crawley manager John Gregory, who clearly viewed the incident through the same light-hearted prism as his player.
“That was the only exciting part of the night I would think, so people dwell on that as opposed to the football match,” Gregory said.
But disciplinary action is bound to follow: it is a fundamental law of football that you cannot go around smacking the paying customers. Though most players would agree that as a rule it is growing ever harder to observe.

It is nearly 20 years since Eric Cantona first broke (or rather leapt over) the wall between performer and audience at English football when he took a diversion via the chest of a lippy fan on his way to the Selhurst Park dressing room. The astonishing thing is, until Connolly’s intervention on Tuesday, it has not happened again. Because if anything, the provocation which pushed the Frenchman to the edge of combustion at Crystal Palace has only got worse.
The bile that pours from the stands at football games is relentless. Anyone taking a corner is subject to astonishing levels of vitriol, having everything hurled at them from plastic bottles to accusations about their girlfriend’s character. These days, in addition to a sprinter’s legs and a marathon runner’s lungs, to make it in the game a professional footballer requires the hide of a rhinoceros and the selective hearing of a maiden aunt.
Just a cursory study of the footage of Connolly’s handbags tells you all you need to know about what happened. As he goes to collect the ball he is assailed by a volley of abuse from a bunch of home supporters, one of whom hurls the ball intemperately at his groin.
When he is foolish enough to respond to their provocation, the group go collectively doolally, jumping up and down and yelling their vituperation at him as if he has just committed the most outrageous crime known to man. Nobody does manufactured outrage with quite the self-righteous aplomb of the football supporter.
These were not teenaged hot-heads, either, who were working themselves up into a boiling froth. These were men unlikely to see 40 again, superannuated hell’s granddads, dressed in their Stone Island anoraks and peaked caps to cover their bald patch; men, in short, who should have known better.
It is not the first time this sort of confrontation has happened at Brentford, either. In December 2012, Karl Robinson, the MK Dons manager, was involved in an altercation on his way to the team bus after a game.
It was later claimed that, during a row with up to 20 home fans, Robinson had a glass thrown at him. His agent, Rob Segal, said of the alleged assault: “It is horrendous. This is a very serious situation and it appears to be getting worse right throughout the game. We have to be able to protect managers as well as players from abuse and potentially violence.”
It was swiftly denied by Brentford that glass could have been thrown, not least because the club wisely serve their drinks in plastic beakers. And the Bees followers were quick to give their version of events, suggesting that Robinson, a man not widely renowned for his reservoirs of restraint, had instigated the problems by vociferously responding to home fans’ taunts.
Though Scouse short temper hardly explains what happened to Graham Taylor at the same club. He was making his way to his car after a game involving Watford, the club he then managed, when he was approached by two men who hurled abuse and beer at him, shouting “get the Turnip”. But for the speedy intervention of a steward, Taylor is convinced he could have been seriously assaulted. And he is not a man who would readily seek out confrontation.
Brentford is by no means alone in the fragile condition of its interaction between visitors and home fans. Football generally seems to invite the kind of behaviour among its customers that would be regarded as utterly unacceptable anywhere else. Spend 90 minutes questioning the parentage of a fellow drinker in your local and the comeback is likely to feature something more substantial than a slap.
Yet football supporters, who in the rest of their lives would be unwilling to say boo to a goose, turn into spume-flecked harridans, howling at opposition players with an aggressive intent that redefines the term impolite.
We appear to believe the purchase of a ticket entitles the holder to behave in a manner utterly removed from the daily round, as if we are collectively transformed the moment we head through the turnstile from polite Dr Jekylls into shouty Mr Hydes.
But woe betide any player who reacts to the nonsense, who so much as puts a finger to their lips to quieten the noise, never mind swings a right hook. At the merest flicker of response, fans behave like the class telltale, filling the phone-ins and chat rooms with their indignation, calling for bans and fines.
Indeed, what the Brentford incident reminds us is that it is not just money which has driven a wedge between player and supporter; given what they see of us during matches, the last thing any player would want to do is mix with the enraged madmen in the stand. Every weekend it is not a meeting of minds, it is a pitched battle.
And in this war between them and us, Paul Connolly undoubtedly went too far. But it is unlikely there will have been many footballers who watched his retaliation and did not secretly congratulate him, wishing they had done exactly the same.

As you said, unfortunately the player will get the punishment for retaliation and no doubt get a ban of some kind from the FA.

Have you seen the way the fan launches the ball at him though....what a twat. Brentford have said they know who he is, let's just hope they ban him for life......although in reality, he'll probably get banned for the rest of the season....all of 3 home games   .

I've not seen the video yet...will have a look.

I know they get paid a fortune for what they do, but they wouldn't scream abuse at a band or a comic they'd paid to see and expect Security to just stand there and not do anything.