Posted: December 22nd 2011
“Absolutely no one believes that racism is a more common scourge in English football today than it was a generation ago”, says today's Guardian editorial 'Racism in football: keep on kicking it out'.
True.
“That’s not to say that racism has been eliminated from English football”.
Also true – and thank goodness this editorial remembered to add that point because the failure to be absolutely clear was the undoing of the hapless (and less than fluent in English) Sepp Blatter. But luckily the Guardian was able to then describe Blatters gaff as “disgraceful ignorance and insouciance”.
Because you’ve got to be careful if you’re going to keep on the right side of Zero Tolerance.
It doesn’t matter if Luis Suarez used ‘negrito’ in a South American cultural context or if there were no witnesses - Zero Tolerance takes no prisoners. And in the rush to show how zero tolerant you are there’s really no time to tolerate discussion on the real reason racism has receded – lets just pretend it receded mainly because of “an effective public embrace of a zero tolerance approach by clubs”. And definitely no time to tolerate discussion over whether abusive or offensive actions/words which occur during the on-pitch fever of footballs celebrated battles should be treated differently. That would be too risky.
Zero Tolerance means zero discretion. It spares its adherents from having to consider context or circumstance ever again.
Posted: December 22nd 2011
“Absolutely no one believes that racism is a more common scourge in English football today than it was a generation ago”, says today's Guardian editorial 'Racism in football: keep on kicking it out'.
True.
“That’s not to say that racism has been eliminated from English football”.
Also true – and thank goodness this editorial remembered to add that point because the failure to be absolutely clear was the undoing of the hapless (and less than fluent in English) Sepp Blatter. But luckily the Guardian was able to then describe Blatters gaff as “disgraceful ignorance and insouciance”.
Because you’ve got to be careful if you’re going to keep on the right side of Zero Tolerance.
It doesn’t matter if Luis Suarez used ‘negrito’ in a South American cultural context or if there were no witnesses - Zero Tolerance takes no prisoners. And in the rush to show how zero tolerant you are there’s really no time to tolerate discussion on the real reason racism has receded – lets just pretend it receded mainly because of “an effective public embrace of a zero tolerance approach by clubs”. And definitely no time to tolerate discussion over whether abusive or offensive actions/words which occur during the on-pitch fever of footballs celebrated battles should be treated differently. That would be too risky.
Zero Tolerance means zero discretion. It spares its adherents from having to consider context or circumstance ever again.