David writes...

"I was at the game on Saturday and was very disappointed with some of the VILE chants that I heard from an admittedly small handful of the travelling Arsenal fans. I took both my kids to their first game this weekend, and although we all loved the experience, my enjoyment was spoiled by some of the things that were being chanted."

"I've always found the references to 'Yids' when singing about Spurs bad enough, but now that my kids go to the Jewish school in Liverpool they somehow seem even worse. How do you explain to your 8 year old daughter, most of whose best friends are Jews, why Arsenal fans are racially abusing the supporters of a team who aren't even playing? And what place do songs about 'willies having foreskins' have at football grounds, for god's sake?"

"However, even those 'songs' were topped on Saturday by chants about Morecambe Bay and cockle-picking whenever Sun Jihai got near the ball and then by songs about the City fans having some bizarre link with Harold Shipman because, like most of them, he was from Manchester. Again how do you explain those chants to inquisitive kids, and why should you have to?

"Sorry to go on, but I was bloody annoyed on Saturday afternoon. I was expecting to have to deal with casual swearing (and had warned my wife that the kids' ears would be opened to several new words!) but the vileness of the songs actually upset me."

David wanted me to stress that it was only a tiny minority of 'fans' that were behaving in the disgraceful way he describes above, perhaps only 4 or 5 people. But any number is too many, and he says that others were complicit in what was going on as they laughed when the 'songs' were sung for the first time, so encouraging the perpetrators. There's clearly a line to be drawn and it's not always clear where to put it. I have to admit to joining in with the 'sign on' songs we direct at the scousers, and enjoy their 'cockney' (ahem) based responses. But songs celebrating drowning Chinese people are definitely the wrong side of that line, and belong in the bin along with the hissing noises and songs about gassing jews (think about what it's like for the many Jewish Arsenal fans, for starters, would you take your kids to hear it?). If anyone reading this joins in with such nasty rubbish (and those about Munich and Hillsborough, while we're at it), please stop. And please let's try to put an end to such things by not encouraging them and preferably also letting the perpetrators know that we disapprove.

As we've said before, the fact that there are lots of black players these days does not mean that racism has been kicked out of football. Not in the boardrooms and dressing rooms, and not on the terraces either. Arsenal is one of the more righteous clubs in this regard, especially these days (for example, in deliberately setting records for the number of black players fielded in a game, almost exactly 2 years ago, as it happens, after our French players and Wenger too had spoken out against the French National Front), but we fans have to accept our responsibilities too.

I know that many Arseweb readers, like myself, share Richard's sentiments regarding recent efforts to get the Highbury crowd to sing more. But any awful new songs they come up with are going to be better than what David and others had to endure at the weekend.