Why Poyet is so wrong to call us colonial for a brave stand on racism

By Oliver Holt

Published 20:59 22/11/11

• 

A strange new orthodoxy has spread in the weeks that have passed since racism in football became a mainstream issue once again.

It seeks to suggest that actually it is the English who are the bigots for failing to understand that, in other cultures, racism is really no big deal.

It is the English, this orthodoxy claims, who are the fools for getting so worked up about casual racial insults when in Spain or Turkey, for instance, no one would bat an eyelid.

It is clever how this argument works because essentially it goes like this: the English are racist for objecting to racism.

The Brighton manager Gus Poyet is one of the leaders of this orthodoxy. Last week, he was shouting his outrage at our pathetic attempts to try to establish whether his compatriot Luis Suarez had a case to answer in his row with Patrice Evra.

Poyet said that, as a Uruguayan, he had put up with plenty of foul abuse when he played in Spain. He said English football needed to fall in line.

"England needs to understand how the rest of the world lives," Poyet said. "You cannot accuse people without a proper investigation, especially when it's a foreigner who is coming from a different place where we treat people of colour in a different way."

Interesting argument. It forgets, of course, that in this case the accuser happens to be French as well as "a person of colour". In this instance, the English are not accusing anyone. We are merely trying to establish what happened.

And in case Poyet had not noticed, John Terry, the England captain, is being treated in exactly the same way as Suarez after similar accusations were levelled at him.

Poyet went on to accuse Evra of "crying like a baby" over his altercation with Suarez. He said he should have kept quiet, like Poyet did when he played in Spain.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it. Keep quiet and carry on. That's effectively what the establishment has been telling black players in this country for 40 years.

Just get on with it. Keep your head down. Don't make a fuss. Don't play the race card. Don't get uppity. Do your talking on the pitch. All the tired old cliches that are simply code for suppressing the truth.

And now because our society has reached a point, thankfully, where the majority find racial abuse offensive, people like Poyet are attempting to silence us, too.

It's a familiar but deeply depressing tactic but it's everywhere at the moment. "Denying racism is the new racism," the American talk-show host and comedian Bill Maher said recently.

You can see it at its most vivid in some of the vile abuse that ex-England player Stan Collymore attracts on Twitter when he seeks to debate the topic of racism.

At its core, the abuse carries the message that he should not be talking about the issue, that he will only make things worse by opening his big mouth.

And when Fifa president Sepp Blatter apologised last week for denying that racism existed in football, his apology was not really an apology at all.

"I can only say I am sorry for all those people affected by my declarations," he said, which just means it's our mistake for getting ourselves in a tizzy about it.

It's just the crazy English screaming and yelping again - that was the sub-text of his 'apology'. Same as we screamed and yelped about corruption in the game and the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar.

Well, sometimes we are arrogant. Often we do carry an over-inflated idea of our position in the world. Sometimes our bombast is laughable.

But not this time. This time, we've got nothing to apologise for. This time, we are absolutely right to insist on investigating accusations of racism in our national game.

I'm glad we're taking the issue seriously. In fact, I'm proud we are. We have nothing to feel guilty about here, however much men like Gus Poyet might try to bully us into believing we do.

Holt: He used to push refs now Di Canio just attacks dugouts

Holt: How Glen and Becks can prove the doubters wrong  

Fancy winning £3,000 for FREE this month? Play Mirror Football Streak for your chance to win cash prizes! Start predicting now!