How unhappy to do you have to be to scream abuse at Robbie Savage?
I was very struck by Robbie Savage’s column this week about how he regularly suffers abuse from people trying to wind him up to react, that he has to have a fellow staff member film his interactions to have evidence of what really happened, to protect against lies and accusations.
If I’d read this when I was a teenager in the mid-70s, I’d have thought it was some sort of sci-fi dystopian fantasy, not Macclesfield on a November afternoon. And everyone I know would feel likewise, which means there must be a group who think it’s perfectly normal that a man should have to record his public life.
Robbie may have a thicker skin than most after heinous abuse – the likes of which most of us will never thankfully know – throughout his playing career, but why should he have to? I was taken by the very modern statement that ‘if someone says I reacted badly, the provocation doesn’t matter, it’s the reaction that’s the story. Without proof, denying it is almost as pointless as reacting in the first place’.
He’s not a pinata to beat with a metaphorical stick. Or a real stick. That sort of behaviour is pathetic and any psychologist would think it is connected to self-loathing and basic unhappiness. To get your pleasure from insulting and being horrible to someone is not ‘just having a laugh’ or worse still ‘banter’, whatever that means. As objectionable as some of these individuals might be, they are mentally ill. If you’re stable, you don’t behave like this.
I’m guilty too. When I was 16 and it was a toxic, upsetting period at home, I’d go to the Boro and shout abuse at players. At one point I was regularly and thoughtlessly chanting ‘Alan Gowling fu*ks Alsatians’. Witless, stupid, meaningless rubbish, only chanted because I was deeply psychologically upset by my home life and had already started spending nights alone in pubs getting drunk, reading books, in order to get away from home. It was a way of laying off my angst. When things got better, it didn’t even occur to me to do it.
Somehow, the modern world has tacitly approved of such behaviour, made more complicated because the abusers are asking for selfies at half-time. I hate, I love you. Bizarre. It is like they don’t think or realise that calling him names or taking the pish about his dead father is as hurtful and nasty as it obviously is.
Robbie Savage: Diary of a Football Manager: Keane’s clash, cameras and coping with abuse…
It leads me to think there is a section of society who live by different rules. Because this isn’t the odd person, it’s a widespread thing. Perhaps it’s born of an age where people feel they are anonymous posters, feel entitled, don’t value their own voice enough to think it can be hurtful or threatening; perhaps more people are unhappy than was once the case. I don’t buy that because life in the mid-70s was bloody hard, not the misty-eyed romanticism of a Facebook meme.
Don’t be fooled by the nostalgia. Life was, at times, cold, miserable and violent, not relieved by the joy of blue tits pecking cream out of milk bottles or frost on the inside of windows or any of the other things people claim to look back on in a ‘times were hard but we were happy’ sort of way. That being said, the worst thing at our school was a French teacher being assaulted with a 12″ dildo – bad, but nobody was stabbed to death.
Robbie just wants to manage a football team. Why does it have to involve anything else? Why does he have to be filmed in case someone wants to have a pop and generate a pathetic news story headlined something like ’Ex-Premier League star made my boy cry’?
This will sound snobbish but I mean it purely in a socially anthropological context…when I was in hospital earlier this year, I met and saw some people who were by most measures the underclass, people who lived in such squalor that they had to be showered because they were too dirty to be admitted. People who wanted to stay in hospital to get three meals a day, some care, attention and warmth, because they didn’t have any of those things on the outside. Though apparently they didn’t appreciate any of it, judging by their endless streams of complaints.
I could imagine these were just the sort of people to try and make themselves feel better and achieve some notoriety amongst their acquaintances by abusing a footballer and trying to get some money out of a spurious court case. It gives me no pleasure to say they were mostly lost causes as people. If you thought they might be rehabilitated in some way, they’d just laugh at you. A life of deprivation had seeped into their DNA and irrevocably warped their mentality.
I like to believe in redemption but I’m not sure that’s possible. I don’t believe it’s jealousy or similar because that would suggest active motivation and that would involve more intellect than that which is on display. I suggest it is more atavistic and, as such, we have to rewire millions of people’s brains. The chances of that? Small. Some suggest calling it out when you see it, but that ignores the fact that it would often be a way to get your head kicked in.
Of course, the people who need to hear this point aren’t listening and aren’t reading an intelligent, nuanced website. If they did, they would probably say it’s woke, despite not knowing what it means. So the voices speaking out about this unacceptable behaviour are not heard except by people who probably at least in part already agree. For football, read society. Same thing. Always.
