By Steve Hill
Football was rocked this week by the untimely passing of the iconic Cyrille Regis – a player who rose from the depths of Non-League to the upper echelons of the English game, and the national team.
Often unplayable, I once had the dubious pleasure of seeing him stick five goals past the Mighty Chester in a 7-2 League Cup defeat at Coventry, prompting the scoreboard to mockingly display: REGIS 5 CHESTER 2.
Improbable as it seemed on that chastening Tuesday night in the Midlands, Regis would go on to spend the final season of his career at Chester City, still proving a menace to defenders many years his junior.
By all accounts, he was an absolute gentleman off the pitch as well, with numerous stories of his humbleness emerging from those who encountered him.
At the peak of his career he was subjected to tirades of despicable racial abuse on a weekly basis, yet will always be remembered for the dignity with which he conducted himself. Nice one Cyrille.
Sadly, a current Chester player recently conducted himself with somewhat less dignity in the face of some comparatively negligible barracking.
Traipsing off the pitch at East Thurrock United following a desultory FA Trophy exit, a 14-year-old Chester fan voiced his (largely accurate) opinion that the team had shown ‘no fight', prompting a cursory retort of “f*** you” from the player in question.
Aberration
Clearly nobody sets out to lose a game, and emotions were running high. But swearing at kids is never a good look, particularly as they represent the future of the club.
The north west is not exactly short of other football clubs, and there is a danger that if you tell someone to ‘go away' they may do exactly that.
Without supporters, football is nothing. As a Chester fan, I have seen us inhabit three different stadiums and play under multiple managers with a turnover of hundreds of players, great swathes of whom – unless they were especially good or especially bad – are simply lost to memory: shirt-filling meat puppets, mere foot soldiers in an unending war.
The only constant is the supporters, a hardcore of whom turn up every week regardless of results. Ostensibly, they are the club, even more so given the fan-owned model under which the reformed Chester FC currently operates.
The potty-mouthed player will be gone within 18 months, having trousered a decent wage to be little more than a footnote in the club's history. That young fan could still be here in half a century, when he's 64. Will we still need him? Absolutely.
Wisely, the player swiftly apologised for his heat-of-the-moment aberration and has apparently offered to buy the lad and dad a drink, so I must offer full respect to him for that. A storm in a teacup, it will hopefully be forgotten by the time he next scores a winner.
Abuse
But the incident does provide a reminder that football is one of the few occupations where criticism is so firsthand and so vociferous. Such abuse is rare in other lines of work, and to be honest I might struggle to bite my lip if I had a crowd of people stood behind me telling me how bad I was at writing: “Garbage, Hill! Call that a sentence? That's an Oxford comma, you idiot!”
It's not that us scribes are free from criticism – far from it – but it isn't generally hurled in our faces at our place of work. Instead it is directed by strangers from the safety of their own homes.
Indeed, a Wrexham-supporting acquaintance recently pointed me in the direction of his club's online forum, where I have variously been described as a ‘nut', ‘an ignorant pr**k', ‘a tosser', and my favourite: ‘plastic scouse horses***'.
Lovely stuff, and all for the heinous crime of supporting a rival football club and penning the occasional glib missive in the back of a newspaper.
Water off a Seal's back, naturally, but if any Wrexham fans would like to apologise and buy me a drink, I'll hopefully be touring the hostelries of your delightful border town prior to our fixture at The Racecourse. “Diolch yn fawr iawn,” mine's a pint of Wrexham Lager. No bubbles…
The Card: Every Match, Every Mile by Steve Hill will be published by Ockley Books. To pre-order a copy, email thecard@ockleybooks.co.uk and quote The NLP
*This article originally featured in The @NonLeaguePaper, which is available every Sunday and Monday
