Chanting About A Dead Chairman: The Tragic Inevitability Of It All

Chris Wright

14th, March 2012

23 Comments

By Chris Wright

Last night, in a sucking wound of a retail park on the outskirts of town, somewhere between Toys ‘R’ Us and the David Lloyd fitness centre, at the far end of the JJB Sports carpark, a particularly unaesthetic 94th-minute winner from Jake Buxton saw Derby County beat Nottingham Forest 1-0 and the likelihood is that you probably couldn’t care less.

Truth be told, it was a shockingly turgid game – rearranged from a sharp, glistening but sadly health and safety-infringing Sunday afternoon in early February to a cold, drab Tuesday evening in March – with the BBC Radio Nottingham matchday commentary team struggling in vain to polish what was so obviously a turd playing out in front of them. Even the usually ebullient Colin Fray had completely given in by half-time:

“Let’s take a moment to sum up that first 45 minutes,” *second of silence* “…right, let’s move on and see how The Stags are getting on against Fleetwood…”

All this while fans were audibly pleading with 62-year old co-commentator (and former Forest and Derby midfielder) John McGovern in the background to lace up his old size nines and attempt to liven up proceedings with a run-out in the second-half.

There were more throw-ins than passes completed in the first-half. Whichever way you look at it, it doesn’t make for much of a spectacle. Unless you’re a Stoke fan of course.

The second half plodded on in an identical vein, long hoof after long hoof met with return long hoof after return long hoof, until 5’8″ Buxton stooped under everyone to head home in the added time that had accrued as a result of delays caused by Derby captain Shaun Barker being stretchered off with a suspected dislocated knee cap and Forest’s Marcus Tudgay picking up a second yellow card in the last few seconds of normal time. The only two incidents of the half.

In summary; it was a poor, poor game of football. Squalid. Bereft. The only real talking point being the risible (and, sadly, almost inevitable) chanting that emanated from sections of the home crowd about Forest’s recently deceased chairman, Nigel Doughty.

Chants such as “Where’s your chairman gone?” and “You’re going down with your chairman,” were sung at several intervals and everyone was sickened and appalled as you’d expect. Indeed, Doughty’s elderly father was in attendance. Can you even fathom what must have been going through his mind, let alone the pit of his stomach?

Derby have since set about issuing a formal apology while Forest players, staff and fans alike are all going on record as being up in arms at their opponent’s fans’ behaviour – and rightly so, you may well suggest.

However, you can’t help but feel that, amid the frothing and posturing, the depressingly inescapable verity is that the very same ‘sections of the Forest support’  – namely, the thick-eared troglodytes at the back – would have been chanting the exact same things if it were Derby who had recently lost one of their number. Call me a heartless cynic, but I’d have a shiny halfpenny on it. Sadly, these are the people we are routinely forced to share our football with.

It’s these ‘sections of support’ – the same sections who got away with racially abusing Tom Adeyemi, who monkey-chanted at Yaya Toure and Mario Balotelli in Porto, who leer ‘paedo’ jibes at Arsene Wenger, who chide and taunt about Munich, Hillsborough and Heysel, etc, etc, etc – that desperatly need to be rooted out and dispensed with. Preferably into an active volcano.

It’s not terrace banter, it’s poisonous bile from amidst the nigh-on impenetrable safety of an almost entirely faceless crowd.

Yes, the chants at Pride Park were malicious, grievously insensitive and vulgar, I’m not trying to defend or absolve anyone of that, but we as Forest fans – nay, as football fans – shouldn’t kid ourselves for one second that the exact same inconsiderate dunces that litter terraces the length and breadth of the land each and every week would have conducted themselves any differently in the same situation.

F**kwits are f**kwits, regardless of the shirt on their back.

Posted in Championship, FAIL, Featured, Songs & Chants

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23 Comments

  1. Mike J says:

    “the same sections who got away with racially abusing Tom Adeyemi”. Since when has calling someone a ‘manc bastard’ been racist abuse??

  2. QPR says:

    In a post about Derby fans, a Liverpool fan still manages to embarrass himself by declaring they never did anything wrong yet again. Well done, you must be proud.

  3. Davy says:

    @ Chris. Yet another brilliant article mate. I love your funny ones but these are also very well written and need to be said!!

  4. Luke says:

    Great article, even with the pro-Forest bias. However, I do wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment here. While I’m not advocating the chants – I was in the section they were belted out, and it was nothing short of despicable (I did not partake, I hasten to add) – to solely claim that ‘sections’ of Derby fans are sick because of one relatively isolated incident (as many Forest fans are doing), which would have been aimed at us had the situations been reversed, is wrong. Much like the chants.

  5. Jonah says:

    Oh dear Mike… Let it go.

  6. Lloyd16 says:

    “the same sections who got away with racially abusing Tom Adeyemi”

    Ah yes, the ‘sections’ of crowd. Namely one man. one man who has not been charged after CCTV and witness statements agreed with his version of events that Adeyemi misheard him.

    Please keep your bias out of it when accusing a man who has not been charged.

  7. eddie says:

    Great post which i 100% agree with. Alot of forest fans are acting holier than thou about this, have the forgoten what they sung in the last few years abt commons dead child and savages dieing father? Fuckwits are fuckwits and sadly alot of the loudest singers at football games are these idiots.

  8. Stewart says:

    People used to think it was just football fans who were like this, horrible bastards, but now the internet and its comments sections have shown us that in fact its everyone. Vile comments by sick minds are everywhere these days. We don’t just share the terraces, we share the country and in fact the globe with them.

  9. Eddie says:

    Good post and nice to see a Forest fan talking sensibly about it all. The Derby fans who sung it were disgraceful but it was only a small number and the majority of fans would never utter such shite.

    Alot of Forest fans posting on twitter and the like are acting very Holier when infact the exact same thing has happened in this fixture in previous years, involving our old chairman Lionel Pickering and Kris Commons dead child. As said in the original blog, football is littered with these idiots, but the majority shouldn’t be tarnished with the same brush.

  10. Dai Banjo says:

    On the Ademyemi issue, the courts used CCTV and isolated audio, plus also used the testimony of supporters whow ere enar by who all agreed that there was no racist abuse…but of course the press wouldnt report that would they!!!

    • Chris says:

      @Dai Banjo: It wasn’t thrown out because there wasn’t any abuse, but because they couldn’t find any conclusive evidence of the abuse. There’s a distinct difference.

      All the evidence presented was deemed inconclusive, including the super-enhanced footage and especially the fan witness statements – which, as I understand, are regarded by the investigating authorities as being almost entirely useless anyway in the vast majority of these cases.

      Like I said, there’s safety in a crowd.

  11. Dave says:

    however forest fans chanting “town full of pakis” “small town in baghdad” and “you used to be English” etc etc wont get mentioned…

  12. Archbishop Betty Snagcock says:

    @Dai Banjo: whilst I agree with you that it was probably a bad trial, we have to have trust in the justice system. If their summation of evidence makes them believe the man is innocent, we have to believe he’s innocent until more evidence is found. If we don’t we hurt everybody who has been wrongly accused of something.
    also i think the fact that the Liverpool fans started chanting Luis Suarez at him says far more.

    @Chris: brilliant article. my mate’s dad is a lecturer at ox uni (so not thick as the people we want to attach these chants to) and he was telling me how he joined in the “sit down you paedophile” chants to wenger and how it was ok because “we all know he’s not really a paedophile”. my response was “oh ok we all know black players aren’t really monkeys, we all know eduardo doesn’t look like heather mills we all know where billy sharp’s son really is, so those chants must be ok too”.
    it’s fair to say we haven’t spoken much since

  13. Susan Sarandon says:

    When I started reading this I was getting a bit annoyed at the anti-Derby slant, but by the end I was pleased to see it wasn’t. I thought it was a bit odd because you’re not usually like that. I’m from Derby, a lot of my friends are Derby fans but I really don’t care if Derby win or lose – I was never into football as a kid when this allegiance is ingrained into people. I support, as I hilariously like to say, football.

    Please don’t think I agree with abuse like this, I don’t. At all. But as I’m sure many of you know, normal, intelligent people can become braindead spastics (yeah i said spastic if we’re getting upset about things) when in a football stadium. Of course i feel sorry for the family of Doughty, but everyone knows these things happen at football. I don’t feel for the fans, as if anyone really cares about who their chairman is as long as they spend money.

    If the same people who were chanting this shit heard (for example) Frankie Boyle make an offensive joke about the Queen or Jade Goody or their own mum or dad they’d probably a be a bit miffed. But football makes it okay, somehow (in their heads, not mine). It’s probably “just banter” to them. But what would football be without shouting abuse at people and chanting? Where does it stop? No picking on gingers, no swearing, no laughing at John Terry’s mum and dad being a shoplifter and drug dealer. What would people chant? “That was a rubbishy pass number 7!”, “Ooh I really don’t like your hairdo Mr Smith!” “Excuse me Mr Smith, I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re terribly bad at this game!” It would be like watching Wimbledon or something.

    Let’s not forget Forest’s chants of “Where’s you daddy gone?” to Nigel Clough and that one about Robert Maxwell bob bob bobbing along. Two wrongs don’t make a right (and neither do 4, 8, 10 or 100). But Forest are outraged at this.

    I know people who “f**king hate dirty Leeds” for things that happened before they were even born! It’s like me saying I f**king hate the the Spanish for all that Armada business, or anyone from the Northern Germany/Netherlands area for all them Anglo-Saxons coming over and turning us all German, and the Japanese, Germans, Italians etc for that World War incident. You should do an article about the idiocy of football hatred too actually. I’m just rambling and probably contradicting myself now. I don’t have the answer. People are naughty and silly and they probably always will be.

    But yeah, f**ckwits are f**ckwits. That basically sums up my feelings – if someone’s a c**t, they’re a c**t, it doesn’t matter what colour, race, age (and in this case, what team they support). There’s not really much point in me even ttyping this, because I’m just agreeing with the article. I’ve not been very eloquent here and probably littered with typos but I’m in a bit of a rush.

    And yes, it’s a horrible, souless stadium/area. Pride Park indeed. At least The New Baseball Ground would’ve had some history behind it. TYpical of the way stadiums are named these days though eh. I didn’t mean to type that much, sorry.

    • Chris says:

      @Susan Sarandon: Yep, I’m not one of those Forest fans that despises Derby. I really have no strong feelings toward them at all. They’re just a team, up the A52, which we perpetually fall apart against when I wish they really rather wouldn’t.

      The Wyvern-bashing, it’s all in jest.

  14. Mr. Sparkle says:

    Obviously we haven’t gone very far since the dark days of the 1980s.

  15. Nick says:

    You’re spot on Chris. I’m a Forest fan, and I’ve seen vast swathes of Forest fans act like knuckle dragging bellends. I’m embarrassed by some chants as any decent human being should be, and disgusted that some people don’t consider you to be a real fan for not joining in. I’ve seen equally disgusting chants at basically every ground I’ve ever been to. But you know what, it’s not the total dickheads that bother me nearly as much as the people floating on the margins. It’s the people like Mike J who probably aren’t chanting abuse, who probably detest that sort of thing, but who can’t hear a bad word about their club without butting in. They’ll defend their club through thick and thin without bothering to think if any criticism is valid.
    I’ve got a Man Utd who’s Facebook status read yesterday evening ‘3 goals tonight, but where’s your fucking Premier League medal’. I sighed. Actually sighed at the patheticness of it all. The stupid playground triabalism of pathetic little boys that are so scared to have their own opinion on anything that they hide in the gang. They feel safe in the gang. People that will never see the beauty of the game as it’s smeared and clouded behind a myopic regional lens. Grow up and realise there is more to life than hating something unconditionally.
    ….and breathe….

  16. gamblino says:

    The bit of me that hates the game grows every day because of these scumbags.

    Speaking of the 80’s, Add to your list the wolves “fans” who gathered round the back of the Billy wright stand on saturday to (among other things) chant “You’re worst than the Bhatti’s” at the chairman. The Bhatti’s being the men that sucked every last drop of life from the club in the 80’s and dragged wolves to the bottom of division 4 and literally minutes away from extinction. The chairman now being a man who has invested tens of millions into the ground and the city, spent as much on players or more as most similar clubs, and kept a premier league club firmly in the black in anticipation of the new finance rules. I suppose you cant appreciate that when you’re grasp of finance consists of making sure you have enough for the bus fare to the dole office after the weel’s fags and special brew.

    The same fans that day started on Jamie O’Hara whist he had his kid in his arms. This is just the latest weekend of it. They’ve been about as long as I have and they’re not going anywhere. Despair!

  17. gamblino says:

    *ignore my angry typo’s

  18. Rob says:

    The same mob mentality that the Nazi’s flourished from, yet these idiots will sing about 10 German bombers at the next En-ger-land game.

  19. wolfinho says:

    doesn’t happen in america, probably because we’re more civilized.

  20. Mike J says:

    @Chris, he’s a grown man what’s he doing bursting into tears anyway????

    The fact is ‘enhanced CCTV footage and witness statements tend to corroborate the story of the individual charged’. That’s a statement from Merseyside Police. Obviously that got a lot less media attention than the initial incident because the media are divisive cunts.

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