Spite

[Section_31]

Maybe it's because we're in the mix for the league for the first time in a very, very long time, but one thing I've noticed is the amount of ill will towards us wanting to win the league. 

 

I'm not going to go down the 'they all hate us' route, but I reckon footy fans in general now spend more time hoping their rivals lose than they actually spend supporting their own football clubs. 

 

What are people's thoughts? I think there's a lot of fans out there now that don't understand football or what it means to support a club, so they can't simply revel in their clubs' own achievements. They've merely picked a side, and for them the 'point' of it is about one-upmanship. I personally feel that's why chelsea and the mancs' fanbases are more vile, as they attract more of this type of 'fan' for the way they've achieved success and marketed themselves. 

[Einch]

Envy also. They fear us being what we were.

[Rambo]

My derby mate was commenting last week how it feels to him that everyone, especially the press, is desperate for us to win it.

Not him though, he still has nightmares from us being the team in the 80's.

[Section_31]

Envy also. They fear us being what we were.

I'm not sure this is true of this generation of fans, as they largely don't remember what we were. I feel it's somehow tied in with the way the country's society has been structured. We're conditioned to scorn each other, whether it's people on benefits street, a shit X Factor singer or another football fan, they're all targets to be belittled and our sense of self worth is somehow enhanced by it.

 

I'm not a Liverpool fan, I didn't lose, I'll celebrate that fact and feel achievement from it. If you do win my sense of self worth will be damaged and I'll blame you for it and thou shalt feel my scorn.

[Bjornebye]

That’s a bold statement considering how we have been about the mancs since they started cleaning up. The 90’s in particular I spent loads of time cheering Blackburn, Newcastle and even fucking Arsenal one from around March when it was clear we wouldn‘t win it, just because I absolutely despise seeing them twats lift the title. I cried with joy in the Kop when Kenny lifted it for Blackburn (I was only 11 to be fair) and I remember hating the final day when Utd beat Boro away to win the league from Newcastle.

 

Most neutrals i’ve spoken too down here want us to win it to be honest. I would expect Utd and Everton fans not to want us to win it, and to be fair, i’m glad they don’t want us too. It’s part of the game. I hate when they win anything. 

[Jairzinho]

Yep. Load of texts, and facebook flooded, by fans of all sorts of clubs after we lost. Spurs fans, Newcastle fans, pulled a couple up on it. Not angrily, just wondering why fans of clubs that have absolutely no rivalry with us at all would prefer to see us fail, and see one of the two toy clubs win the league.

 

There's a couple of them, and they've gone full Everton. No idea when their own club is even playing. I just don't get it, United and Everton aside, I'd want any other club to beat City and Chelsea to the league title.

[Lee909]

I posted this on the MF in the 25 years thread. There is general dislike of Liverpool as a whole in large parys of the country imo(I live and was born in Watford so see what the thoughts are in thr south). Its really mixed down here but there is a resentment of the Hillsborough anniversary and the city has been tarred by thr stereotypes aimed at it over the years.

 

 

 

 

 

PAUL VALLELY

Sunday 27 April 2014

The 96 reasons the jokes about Hillsborough are wearing thin

The abusive comments posted about the dead are shocking – but not as surprising as they should be

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In Liverpool there have been two responses to the revelation that somebody has, for three years, been using government computers to post abuse on Wikipedia about the 96 people who died at Hillsborough in Britain's worst single sporting disaster.

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Some heard the news open-mouthed, unable to conceive that anyone would mock the dead in this way. The club legend "You'll Never Walk Alone" had been pitilessly altered to read "You'll Never Walk Again". And worse. But for others the news, though shocking, came as no surprise. Over the past 25 years they have grown used to the contempt.

There is something about Liverpudlians which raises the ire, or at least the irritation, of certain people. Disdainful stereotypes litter our cultural history. In the 1980s there were the feckless benefit cheats of the Carla Lane sitcom Bread. In the 1990s came Harry Enfield's permed, perpetually plastered, pugilistic Scousers. A decade on came a pair of thieving scallies in Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. And in between there flowed a constant tide of cheap gags asking what you call a Liverpudlian in a suit.

You will find none of this on the website of the Hillsborough inquest now taking place in Warrington, 25 years after the flawed original coroner's court hearing. There, in page after page of profoundly moving personal testimony, you will hear about a different kind of Liverpudlian.

There is the woman who has not married because her dead father cannot walk her down the aisle. The lost boy who sat on his blind neighbour's garden wall describing the plants to her. The wife who let her husband put off signing the contract for their new house so he could go to the fatal match. The dad who cherishes the coffee table that was the last thing he made with his son. The couple who never found out about the surprise 25th wedding anniversary party that had been planned by their family. The boy whose dying word was "Mum".

A litany of love, everyday and yet extraordinary, is being recited before the coroner.

In the face of that what could explain such animus against the victims that a series of sickening revisions could be made to the online encyclopedia from Whitehall's computer network? The words "Blame Liverpool fans" were added. "This is Anfield", the phrase that appears above the players' tunnel at the club's ground, was altered to read "This is a S***hole". Other changes are best not repeated. They were made using the government's secure intranet from the Office of the Solicitor General, the Treasury and the Department for Culture.

Perhaps they will prove to be the work of one rogue civil servant. But they are representative of a subterranean stratum which extrudes itself in the public consciousness from time to time – in the comic stereotypes, in the calumny of The Sun headlines about Liverpool fans at Hillsborough urinating on the dead or in prejudices of mainstream politicians such as Boris Johnson, who in 2004 infamously accused the city of being "hooked on grief" and "wallowing in its victim status".

Liverpool has had its concentration of tragedy, as names such as Bulger, Alder Hey, Heysel and Hillsborough convey. But there is a deeper psycho-sociology to the place, once the second city of Empire.

Over the past century the population of what was Britain's greatest port has dropped from a million to just half of that. Its economic decline did not sap Liverpool's pride. But the city's Us-and-Them identity subtly migrated to a more oppositional Them vs Us. It brought with it dependency, though without deference, and a truculence and entitlement epitomised in the fiasco of the city's Militant council in the 1980s. But it also nurtured the quick, funny, ironic sense of chippy self-deprecation evident in generations of caustic comedians from Ken Dodd to Jimmy Tarbuck to John Bishop. It was wit as weapon.

Yet mythology sometimes ceases to bear any relationship to reality. For all the typecasting about criminality and poverty Liverpool is statistically one of the safest cities in which to live. London, Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield all have more burglaries and car crimes per person. Violent attacks are twice as common in London. And Liverpool's economy is beginning to recover from its long post-war decline, creating jobs at double the national average for the past three decades.

Something singular survives, though, in that Scouse spirit. What strikes me on frequent visits to Liverpool is that it is the place in England where old forms of communality and solidarity have best endured. Nowhere has that been more evident in recent weeks than in the support that the city's other football club, Everton, gave to its greatest rival at the 25th anniversary memorial of the Hillsborough tragedy.

Two clubs, one community – from which, five years ago, a single voice was lifted when a man called Roy Dixon heckled Government minister Andy Burnham with the single word "justice". The cry was taken up by the crowd, by the city and rippled out from there to the wider world. In response the Government set up the Independent Hillsborough Panel, chaired with fierce objectivity by the then Bishop of Liverpool James Jones. It clinically exposed a massive establishment cover-up and asked profound questions about our country and the way it is run.

The powerful footballing resurgence, against the odds, of Liverpool FC this year is a symbol of something reborn in the city. How fitting it would be – even an Everton fan such as Andy Burnham has conceded – if Liverpool were to win the Premier League in this of all years.

Paul Vallely is visiting professor of public ethics at University of Chester

[Strontium]

Envy also. They fear us being what we were.

 

I find that most human behaviour can be explained away either by envy or its twin emotion, jealousy. People are very petty creatures at heart.

[Major Tom]

It seems to me there's a mix. As there would be with any club, I guess.

 

I am happy to see Norwich go down and happy to see Sunderland stay up. I have absolutely no association with either of those clubs.

 

Football is a funny old game.

[Preston Red]

If you want to search out a cunt on Facebook, look no further than Paul Phillips Young. Leeds fan who took to posting all sorts about Hillsborough yesterday after we lost. Maybe you might want to let his wife know too that he's been shagging some bird from Chorley.

 

Just a thought.

[Major Tom]

I'm not going to go down the 'they all hate us' route, but I reckon footy fans in general now spend more time hoping their rivals lose than they actually spend supporting their own football clubs. 

.

 

If you are going by message boards, don't. Football message boards are mental and not entirely reflective in my opinion. People say lots of shit they wouldn't actual feel or say in person. Purely because they can.

[Bjornebye]

If you want to search out a cunt on Facebook, look no further than Paul Phillips Young. Leeds fan who took to posting all sorts about Hillsborough yesterday after we lost. Maybe you might want to let his wife know too that he's been shagging some bird from Chorley.

 

Just a thought.

 

I hope someone does this 

[jamespp]

I think the Luis Suarez/Evra thing unfairly got us a lot of hate with neutrals, although you have to wonder why they only wanted to listen to one side of the story, maybe didnt like us in the first place

[chrisbrand]

All the United fans showed up on my Facebook feed yesterday going on about the Chelsea result being "hilarious."

Unsurprisingly, 99 percent of them live nowhere near Manchester and have never been to Old Trafford.

I don't normally rise to it but I was not in a good mood yesterday. I had to point out losing the title in the 93rd minute of the last game of the season was far more amusing in my opinion.

[Section_31]

I think it's only natural for mancs to want us to lose, any self respecting Liverpool fan would be the same with them, I just pick it up from fans of other clubs and they tend to be people that possess only a secondary interest in football, it's as though 'the point' of football has become purely about singling out failure.

[skend04]

If you want to search out a cunt on Facebook, look no further than Paul Phillips Young. Leeds fan who took to posting all sorts about Hillsborough yesterday after we lost. Maybe you might want to let his wife know too that he's been shagging some bird from Chorley.

 

Just a thought.

I could do this. His wife isn't likely to chop his penis off or anything crazy like that is she? I don't want to be an accomplice to a crime, however amusing it might be.

[RedRazor]

Nah not for me.

 

There are teams I like and there are teams I dislike. There are also some teams I despise.

 

Why? I don't really know in most cases. They will have (or I may have perceived that they have) perpetrated some personal slight against me at some time in my life - possibly. Maybe the colour of their kit? Their nickname? The name of their ground? Maybe they rolled over and died against Utd sometime in the last 20 years when they should have put up a fight?

 

I don't know and don't care - surely that is what comes with being a football supporter.

 

For the record - I am a red but also a big Carlisle Utd and Borussia Monchengladbach fan having lived in both places and watched many games at both. For reasons associated with these clubs I also have a big downer on WBA (bastards stopped us going to Wembley when it meant something) and Inter Milan (cheating bastards - the coke can was empty).

[KevieG]

I've been pretty magnanimous all year but lo and behold am getting it in the neck from all the previously quiet boys today.

 

If we manage to win this I'll go to town on it. the more smalltime the better.

[deiseach]

I think there is a lot of fear and loathing over the prospect of a relatively unheralded team roaring to the title. It’s something I’ve particularly noticed among Arsenal fans but it applies to lots of other clubs, i.e. they’ve consoled themselves at their lack of success by telling themselves that it’s all down to the oil barons and winning the league is impossible for anyone other than Man Utd, Chelsea and Man City. And if truth be told, I can see where they’re coming from. Misery loves company. Add in excusable irritation at the media narrative that has all neutrals cheering Liverpool on, and inexcusable contempt for Scousers and their refusal to shut up when told to by the establishment, and you have a toxic mix. On the basis that it would take too much effort to unpick the excusable from the inexcusable, and only give me gas anyway, it’s not something that has bothered me. Although it might now that it looks like we’re not going to do it...

[jamespp]

Nah not for me.

 

There are teams I like and there are teams I dislike. There are also some teams I despise.

 

Why? I don't really know in most cases. They will have (or I may have perceived that they have) perpetrated some personal slight against me at some time in my life - possibly. Maybe the colour of their kit? Their nickname? The name of their ground? Maybe they rolled over and died against Utd sometime in the last 20 years when they should have put up a fight?

 

I don't know and don't care - surely that is what comes with being a football supporter.

 

 

I can relate to this, I remember being delighted watching middlesbrough get hammered in UEFA cup final but if you asked me why, I wouldn't know

[markcd]

I can relate to this, I remember being delighted watching middlesbrough get hammered in UEFA cup final but if you asked me why, I wouldn't know

 

I can certainly relate to this - sometimes I'm actually surprised by my own level of bile / spite call it what you will. The thing that I don't get is when this spills over into Facebook, twitter, whatever; - I'll certainly be cheering on Madrid when they play Chelsea, but going from this to posting pictures of Frank Lampards mum - i just don't get it...

[LFC64]

Maybe it's because we're in the mix for the league for the first time in a very, very long time, but one thing I've noticed is the amount of ill will towards us wanting to win the league. 

 

I'm not going to go down the 'they all hate us' route, but I reckon footy fans in general now spend more time hoping their rivals lose than they actually spend supporting their own football clubs. 

 

What are people's thoughts? I think there's a lot of fans out there now that don't understand football or what it means to support a club, so they can't simply revel in their clubs' own achievements. They've merely picked a side, and for them the 'point' of it is about one-upmanship. I personally feel that's why chelsea and the mancs' fanbases are more vile, as they attract more of this type of 'fan' for the way they've achieved success and marketed themselves. 

 

Couldn't agree more. I'd say the proportion of 'followers' who get more out of one-upmanship and the misfortune of others is than their own club's achievements is growing fast.

The Premiershits

[deiseach]

I can relate to this, I remember being delighted watching middlesbrough get hammered in UEFA cup final but if you asked me why, I wouldn't know

I do. It's a dog-in-the-manger attitude. You (and I) didn't want Boro winning a trophy that was associated in many minds with our spectacular win in 2001. Not a reputable stance, but it's far less obnoxious to want Sevilla to win than wanting Chelsea or Man City to win!

[LFC64]

I think it's only natural for mancs to want us to lose, any self respecting Liverpool fan would be the same with them, I just pick it up from fans of other clubs and they tend to be people that possess only a secondary interest in football, it's as though 'the point' of football has become purely about singling out failure.

Agree with all your posts about this mate. I think you have it spot on.

[Baltar]

'Neutral' fans prefer to see City and Chelsea win so they can blame their success on oil money, oligarchs etc. Or they favour United due to their traditional dominance which is supposedly impossible to oppose unless you have a billionaire benefactor willing to spend silly money to overthrow them.

If we win it they have no excuses so these fans are desperate for us to fail. Pretty petty if you ask me...