AS A nation we are hitting the boos big style. Booooo. Feral trackie-bottomed bile on Jeremy Kyle; Boooooo. Co-ordinated jeering by the militant saddos gathered outside the Big Brother House with 'look at me' placards; Booooo. Hand-picked idiots eagerly barracking to order on the X-Factor as pantomime villain Simon Cowell tells another tone deaf wannabe to stick to karaoke. It is becoming second nature.
Booing was once a very un-English thing, heard only in the most extreme cases of moral outrage when the traditional strait jacket of reserve was cast aside and collective public disapproval was demanded. Now it seems to be the default setting. It is the soundtrack to our cultural decline. So why commentators are surprised that Ashley Cole got a Wembley roasting is beyond me.
Someone was going to get it - that is what people expect of a public gathering at the New Tyburn. When they built what Ian Wright correctly calls a White Elephant national stadium they should have left the contrived icon of a huge arch on the drawing board and just gone for a massive gallows complete with noose. That would have been more apt, more honest and might have scared the hell out of visiting teams.
It comes to something when, despite a four goal away hammering of the chief group rivals in the last game, the manager has to plead with fans not to boo if mighty England - the Geordies of international football - are not six nowt up after 20 minutes against the Asian minnows' U-21 side.
He should have saved his breath. A scapegoat was demanded. The seething mass, high on tabloid fuelled expectations only on nodding terms with reality, with barely concealed club prejudices ripped out of their normal context and the newly established Pavlovian instinct to boo it was always going to happen. The crowd were not to be denied their inalienable right to pour indisciminate bile on some poor sap. I'm just glad that Stewart Downing wasn't playing. They'd have torn him limb-from-limb in the warm-up.
In the event it was Ashley Cole. Let's be honest, most football fans (including some Chelsea ones if they are honest) wouldn't need much prompting to boo Cole. He is symptomatic of the new breed of crass and greedy players locked in a pampered bubble of bling. He snarls, whinges, moans and portays himself as a victim at every turn. He turned the stomach when he claimed he felt 'physically sick' and 'betrayed' when Arsenal - the club who had nurtured him - only offered him £55k a week and then used that demeaning insult as an excuse to join a club he had already been rumbled meeting in a 'tapping' row. He has also built up an unsavoury tabloid cuttings file. I bet he gets booed in Sainsburys.
But the booing and the aftermath has raised a string of interesting issues, some of which I have touched on in my Gazette column this week. Most obvious to seasoned Boronaics will be the very different way this particular terrace taunting has been treated compared to Dowing.
The booing of Ashley Cole for what was a minor transgression has prompted the Football Association, the manager, his team-mates and the press to rally round to protect the poor sensitive love from such harsh treatment. The FA defied PR logic and entered the minefield of mental health to pronounce their own customers as "crazy" , the boss and stand-in skipper Rio Ferdinand combined to defend him too. That's admirable bigclubtastic solidarity.
How very different to the treatment of Downing, vilified against Andorra by a spittle flecked flock of beer-bellied knuckle-draggers - and then given a more subtle but just as damaging mauling by the press and forced to carry the can for a less than sparkling 3-0 win. No FA statement then, no manager going public to take the flak (although to be honest it probably suited the toothy grinned then incumbant to have a shield from the red-top barrage), no duck-billed shop-steward to step in and certainly no hand-wringing media churning out why-oh-whys about the morality of scapegoating. Oh no, poor Stewy was hung out to dry.
But the England booing - which is different from the club specific version we have covered at length on here in the past - raises other issues too, chiefly about the nature of the atmosphere of endemic hostility at Wembley. It has certainly changed. There is more booing, it is more easily triggered and it is far more easily shaped and manipulated by the poison pen pack who think they should pick the team. If the press launch a collective broadside against a player they don't like it is tantamount to leave him stood above the trapdoor with noose draped ominously on his shoulders waiting for the mistake that will throw the handle and leaving him kicking as part of the spectacle. In recent years it has been Downing, Crouch, Bentley, Robinson, James and even Beckham pushed into the firing line by a cynical press, targets that have been eagerly rounded on by a short-sighted and gullible mob who don't need asking twice to put the boot in.
That is not to say the old Wembley was always nice. Theremay have been a Golden Age, a Pathe News era of Corinthian crowds and polite applause for skills from the opposition, but that is long gone. Far more recent and less easily brushed over is the unsavoury dark years when the scapegoating had a far nastier undercurrent. When it was John Barnes the booing was mixed in with obvious high-volume monkey-noises and vicious racist insults.
So although the booing now is more obvious, closer to the surface and more indiscriminate it is not worse. The character has changed. It is more frequent, more pervasive and more easily triggered (it is certainly not all about the result because England recent record is more than respectable and puts them easily in the top ten in the world) but not as deep or dark.
It has become booing-lite, as much a game-playing release of wider frustrations as anything specific to the target and like the screaming aimed at BB evictees or the freak show exhibits on bearpit TV it is insincere and transient, readily transferred to the next media-created Aunt Sally to come along. It is pantomime booing, dissent by numbers and to a subliminally recognised pattern. So chill, Ashley, it's nothing personal.
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