Sexist chants at Lane, are we guilty?

[Sean Thornton]

Forced adoption. It's a Blades General Chat first.......

 

[Northyorksblade]

Which game was that? I genuinely didn't think i had heard it for a while, and I've been away quite a lot this season

Middlesbrough and I've heard it since even when he wasn't playing.

 

[Pedro's Winger]

This thread has really opened my eyes about all the hate that festers at football matches. I think we’d all better stop going. And if anybody has too, for goodness sake don’t sing anything, Best not even speak. And to think I used to go because it seemed like simple pleasure with my mates. Now I realise I am not morally superior to a serial rapist. I think for penance I ought to be flogged by a transgender person of colour until I am sorry

You can enjoy going but still cringe at some of our fans - or any fans - chants.
Most fans felt like that when racist chanting was relatively commonplace - though not many black fans as they were unlikely to be there in the first place.

 

[Rodley]

With the 'I've not heard it for three years so it can't happen' line despite a fair few others on this thread alone hearing it regularly.
Do you genuinely believe the problem of sexist chants is solely a Wednesday one, because of the latest example of it?

I’m not one to bag out the local media and try to be even handed, but if it was a full away end of Blades singing that song the prevailing media headlines would have been “Blades shame” not “Both Football clubs need to address sexist chanting Issue”. If you think otherwise you’re naive in the extreme.

 

[super_pig]

I think we should stop singing the Greasy Chip Butty song,it's glamourising a very unhealthy lifestyle and storing problems up for future generations,the NHS will simply not be able to cope,we should be promoting stopping smoking,drinking sensible amounts of alcohol and healthy eating habits

don't give these clowns ideas mate.. no doubt someone will be 'offended'

 

[HodgysBrokenThumb]

I’m not one to bag out the local media and try to be even handed, but if it was a full away end of Blades singing that song the prevailing media headlines would have been “Blades shame” not “Both Football clubs need to address sexist chanting Issue”. If you think otherwise you’re naive in the extreme.

Of course some people might think it is naive to believe that any football fans ever believe that others are fair to them and their club. After about 80% of matches I go home convinced that the referee was against us; listen to phone-ins, and fans of other clubs think the same. It's what we do...

 

[Cerberus Blade]

One is a song that has been sang by Unitedites for years, celebrating our ability to drink copious amounts of beer, and the fact that being a Blademan improves your chances of having sexual intercourse with members of the opposite sex, and up until this conjuncture it hasn’t been a problem or offended anybody.

The Wednesday pondlife managed to engaged the collective two brain cells and come up with the ditty. “Chrissy Wilder, his daughters a slag”, as well as engaging in a pretty horrendous and vile internet campaign of abuse and it is effectively slag shaming, not forgetting threatening the partner of a Wednesday cult hero when she stood up to a young woman being publicly named a slag in a football match.

Suddenly it becomes a huge issue for both clubs. Well it isn’t. It is a problem for one side of the city, and certain elements of that side of the city need exposure, need to be contrition and you could have been the man do that, but you’ve missed a trick. So why is it a huge problem for us as well as them, or don’t your organ grinders want the monkey to start flinging shit.

I must admit, I don’t like that chant about drinking their beer and shagging their women. And it makes me laugh because most of those singing it would have a 50% success rate st best!

I also dislike the “Sheffield is full of tits, fanny and United” chant.

It’s the stuff of riff-raff.

Totally unnecessary, not funny or clever, and not worthy of our great club. We’re better than that.

In time to come people will find themselves arrested for such stuff. And bring it on because we need to move forward. It’s the same as racist chants and needs banishing from the game.

 

[stringer]

I’m not one to bag out the local media and try to be even handed, but if it was a full away end of Blades singing that song the prevailing media headlines would have been “Blades shame” not “Both Football clubs need to address sexist chanting Issue”. If you think otherwise you’re naive in the extreme.

No it wouldn’t. Why the hell would it?

 

[Dkc]

Sorry, I can't be bothered reading all ten pages. So is Chansiri's wife definitely a woman?

 

[northsomersetblade]

Sorry, I can't be bothered reading all ten pages. So is Chansiri's wife definitely a woman?

Best current guess is that she's gender neutral

 

[Hamburg Blade]

This thread has really opened my eyes about all the hate that festers at football matches. I think we’d all better stop going. And if anybody has too, for goodness sake don’t sing anything, Best not even speak. And to think I used to go because it seemed like simple pleasure with my mates. Now I realise I am not morally superior to a serial rapist. I think for penance I ought to be flogged by a transgender person of colour until I am sorry

You can't call it penance whilst rewarding yourself.

 

[northsomersetblade]

You can't call it penance whilst rewarding yourself.

Come on, be fair, if I'm going to invoke Biblical punishments I'm expected to be a hypocrite. Everyone else that does is. Or a nutter

 

[bricktop]

I must admit, I don’t like that chant about drinking their beer and shagging their women. And it makes me laugh because most of those singing it would have a 50% success rate st best!

I also dislike the “Sheffield is full of tits, fanny and United” chant.

It’s the stuff of riff-raff.

Totally unnecessary, not funny or clever, and not worthy of our great club. We’re better than that.

In time to come people will find themselves arrested for such stuff. And bring it on because we need to move forward. It’s the same as racist chants and needs banishing from the game.

I must admit that it has never bothered me in the slightest, although I had never thought of it of in the context of the way it has been portrayed, although the tits, fanny and United song is fairly standard as a lot of other clubs sing it, however Brownie Jnr thinks the shag your women is actually kiss your women.

Those two songs might be coming to the end of their days, one thing I’ve learnt this week is with the death of Cyrille Regis is that attitudes do change with time, where bananas being thrown and racist songs being sang used to be fairly common place, now if you stood up and sang thst you would be battered. I can remember from being a young lad starting supporting football players been called n*****s, c**ns, and the ditty ‘you black bastard’, that all went 20+ years ago and Football is a better game for it.

It is possible to hold less than savoury views when you are younger, only to learn and grow and reject those views. I know because 20 odd years ago I hated homosexuality and couldn’t stand Asians, but now I’ve got quite a few gay friends and judge them on what they are like as people and if I like them as a person then that is more important than their sexual preference. Same with Asians, I’ve learned the vast majority are good people, and if you treat them with respect then they will do the same.

 

[Hamburg Blade]

Come on, be fair, if I'm going to invoke Biblical punishments I'm expected to be a hypocrite. Everyone else that does is. Or a nutter

Better to be a nutter than a hypocrite, I always find.




Wibble.

 

[Deleted member 1486]

No it wouldn’t. Why the hell would it?

Not aimed at me but I'll answer anyway:

I'd suggest it's because over the years The Star has taken every opportunity possible to stick the boot into United, whilst constantly looking the other way to the other club's (far, far worse) newsworthy incidents. As a club there have been times when they have been morally bankrupt, and would have been held to account by any respectable media outlet, instead their crimes (sometimes in the literal sense) were completely ignored by your employers until the stories were picked up by the nationals.

You can also apply the above to your reporting and criticism (or lack thereof) towards the South Yorkshire Police.

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

(I was tempted to call you The Stir, but given "stirring" has been the last thing you've been willing to do it would be kind of ironic).

 

[Sean Thornton]

I must admit, I don’t like that chant about drinking their beer and shagging their women. And it makes me laugh because most of those singing it would have a 50% success rate st best!

I also dislike the “Sheffield is full of tits, fanny and United” chant.

It’s the stuff of riff-raff.

Totally unnecessary, not funny or clever, and not worthy of our great club. We’re better than that.

In time to come people will find themselves arrested for such stuff. And bring it on because we need to move forward. It’s the same as racist chants and needs banishing from the game.

Both sung by the riff raff years ago.

 

[stringer]

Not aimed at me but I'll answer anyway:

I'd suggest it's because over the years The Star has taken every opportunity possible to stick the boot into United, whilst constantly looking the other way to the other club's (far, far worse) newsworthy incidents. As a club there have been times when they have been morally bankrupt, and would have been held to account by any respectable media outlet, instead their crimes (sometimes in the literal sense) were completely ignored by your employers until the stories were picked up by the nationals.

You can also apply the above to your reporting and criticism (or lack thereof) towards the South Yorkshire Police.

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

(I was tempted to call you The Stir, but given "stirring" has been the last thing you've been willing to do it would be kind of ironic).

Any examples of ‘sticking the boot into United’ off the top of your head?

 

[bricktop]

To be quite honest, and this without any disrespect to but The Star is off little consequence any more, and hasn’t been for a long time in my view.

I didn’t agree with the pretty nasty, open and vicious abuse that went in the direction of a teenage girl just because her Dad is manager of Sheffield United, and I personally I felt it was in the local interest for that to be reported. Unfortunately the journalists and editorial team took this story in a different direction.

The only contact I generally have with the Star nowadays is reading it online, usually links of Facebook, and the content of it has been dumbed down heavily to what it was a few years ago. It just generally tends to be clickbait, and reading through the comments is generally a lot more interesting and amusing than the actual content.

Years ago before the advent of easily accessible mobile content, I bought the Star every day as I was interested in local affairs, and when I was a young man working away from home on the holidays camps I used to get the Green Un posted to me every week. I also used to buy a couple of other newspapers a day, usually a tabloid for the Sports coverage, and then a broadsheet to sit down with and have a proper read. I used to buy a lot of magazines like FourFourTwo, When Saturday Comes and stuff like that. The last time I bought a physical newspaper was for the paper to wrap stuff up with when I moved house last year and didn’t even bother reading it. Nowadays I still keep abreast of current affairs and generally read the Guardian online, but when something piques my interest I’ll read 3 or 4 articles from a spectrum of different sources. It is easier and a lot better than taking my information from one source.

The one thing is, and I’m pretty sure Danny04 will fully agree with this, but every single newspaper out there, is owned by a different company or proprietors, and generally they have their own agendas and stakeholders to appease whilst presenting their own views, and they are reluctant to publish anything that doesn’t toe their own line.

 

[Dkc]

I imagine The Star's owners are more interested in balancing the books than promoting an agenda, especially one that will alienate thousands of local readers. I'm sure bad editorial decisions have been made in the past regarding coverage of our local clubs but The Star has no ingrained bias against United. You only have to look on Owlstalk to see that many of their fans have the reverse view, and see a pro-Blades bias when none exists.

 

[Hamburg Blade]

To be quite honest, and this without any disrespect to but The Star is off little consequence any more, and hasn’t been for a long time in my view.

I didn’t agree with the pretty nasty, open and vicious abuse that went in the direction of a teenage girl just because her Dad is manager of Sheffield United, and I personally I felt it was in the local interest for that to be reported. Unfortunately the journalists and editorial team took this story in a different direction.

You say you don't buy the Star but seem informed enough about the article to make this statement and criticise it heavily. Post #122 by HodgysBrokenThumb suggests that the article did what you would have wanted and didn't take it "in a different direction". Have you read the article you are so unhappy about?

 

[Pedro's Winger]

To be quite honest, and this without any disrespect to but The Star is off little consequence any more, and hasn’t been for a long time in my view.

I didn’t agree with the pretty nasty, open and vicious abuse that went in the direction of a teenage girl just because her Dad is manager of Sheffield United, and I personally I felt it was in the local interest for that to be reported. Unfortunately the journalists and editorial team took this story in a different direction.

The only contact I generally have with the Star nowadays is reading it online, usually links of Facebook, and the content of it has been dumbed down heavily to what it was a few years ago. It just generally tends to be clickbait, and reading through the comments is generally a lot more interesting and amusing than the actual content.

Years ago before the advent of easily accessible mobile content, I bought the Star every day as I was interested in local affairs, and when I was a young man working away from home on the holidays camps I used to get the Green Un posted to me every week. I also used to buy a couple of other newspapers a day, usually a tabloid for the Sports coverage, and then a broadsheet to sit down with and have a proper read. I used to buy a lot of magazines like FourFourTwo, When Saturday Comes and stuff like that. The last time I bought a physical newspaper was for the paper to wrap stuff up with when I moved house last year and didn’t even bother reading it. Nowadays I still keep abreast of current affairs and generally read the Guardian online, but when something piques my interest I’ll read 3 or 4 articles from a spectrum of different sources. It is easier and a lot better than taking my information from one source.

The one thing is, and I’m pretty sure Danny04 will fully agree with this, but every single newspaper out there, is owned by a different company or proprietors, and generally they have their own agendas and stakeholders to appease whilst presenting their own views, and they are reluctant to publish anything that doesn’t toe their own line.

I read the Star a lot less than I used to and pretty much only online these days. Its quality has declined in line with many newspapers' who've been making less money, employing less staff - like any other business.
Ironically the flipside to everything being available online is that people are actually reading newspapers far more than they used to and it's easy to check articles even on the same story by reading several sources when you'd never have physically gone out and bought four or five newspapers back in the day.
I don't think the Star is biased against United but I do think they don't - and never did - ask the harder questions of any of our local clubs when it comes to more prickly issues, usually boardroom stuff.
With that kind of stuff you tend to find out more from fans websites, like this one.

 

[bricktop]

You say you don't buy the Star but seem informed enough about the article to make this statement and criticise it heavily. Post #122 by HodgysBrokenThumb suggests that the article did what you would have wanted and didn't take it "in a different direction". Have you read the article you are so unhappy about?

I’ve read the article thanks to the modern wonders of the internet.

 

[HodgysBrokenThumb]

I’ve read the article thanks to the modern wonders of the internet.

In the print version, it was 2 separate but related articles on the same page, with the item about Wednesdayites the larger and more prominent one. I don't know whether it cane across the same way on-line.

 

[HodgysBrokenThumb]

I read the Star a lot less than I used to and pretty much only online these days. Its quality has declined in line with many newspapers' who've been making less money, employing less staff - like any other business.
Ironically the flipside to everything being available online is that people are actually reading newspapers far more than they used to and it's easy to check articles even on the same story by reading several sources when you'd never have physically gone out and bought four or five newspapers back in the day.
I don't think the Star is biased against United but I do think they don't - and never did - ask the harder questions of any of our local clubs when it comes to more prickly issues, usually boardroom stuff.
With that kind of stuff you tend to find out more from fans websites, like this one.

I agree with much of what you say there. There are interesting questions arising out of people reading newspapers online. I know it is a generation thing, but I get the strong sense that online encourages people to skim rather than read carefully, and to move on to other items after a couple of sentences, etc. Whilst it is easy to check later, it does increase the tendency to form a quick judgement after a headline and a couple of sentences, usually in line with our own pre-conceptions. And it is sometimes/often the case on forums that when both sides in a disagreement explain fully what they mean, the differences turn out to be rather small. We need to learn how to react better in this new world of instant reactions.

 

[Sean Thornton]

Looks like it's quiet news day for the Star...

 

[Pedro's Winger]

I agree with much of what you say there. There are interesting questions arising out of people reading newspapers online. I know it is a generation thing, but I get the strong sense that online encourages people to skim rather than read carefully, and to move on to other items after a couple of sentences, etc. Whilst it is easy to check later, it does increase the tendency to form a quick judgement after a headline and a couple of sentences, usually in line with our own pre-conceptions. And it is sometimes/often the case on forums that when both sides in a disagreement explain fully what they mean, the differences turn out to be rather small. We need to learn how to react better in this new world of instant reactions.

I think that's true and it's also magnified by social media like Twitter where people can just indulge a bit of confirmation bias by reading 140 characters.

 

[HodgysBrokenThumb]

I think that's true and it's also magnified by social media like Twitter where people can just indulge a bit of confirmation bias by reading 140 characters.

If there is one thing I would like to see achieved in education (world-wide), it would be giving youngsters the ability to read carefully, critically (the ability to spot bias and contradictions), and to question the motives of the writer. Print books and newspapers used to go through a process of editing, and people got used to trusting them (wrongly, in some cases). Now, especially online, you have to ask yourself all the time who is writing and why. About 20 years ago, when Google had been invented and I had never heard of it, I started receiving essays from youngsters saying one thing on one page, and something totally contradictory on the next; it took me a while to realise that they were lifting opinions from here, there and everywhere, and not seeing the need to look at the contradictions. I understood that they would thus limit their opportunities in the outside world. I was horrified to learn many years later that one of their ilk had been elected President of the USA...

 

[BushBlade]

If there is one thing I would like to see achieved in education (world-wide), it would be giving youngsters the ability to read carefully, critically (the ability to spot bias and contradictions), and to question the motives of the writer. Print books and newspapers used to go through a process of editing, and people got used to trusting them (wrongly, in some cases). Now, especially online, you have to ask yourself all the time who is writing and why. About 20 years ago, when Google had been invented and I had never heard of it, I started receiving essays from youngsters saying one thing on one page, and something totally contradictory on the next; it took me a while to realise that they were lifting opinions from here, there and everywhere, and not seeing the need to look at the contradictions. I understood that they would thus limit their opportunities in the outside world. I was horrified to learn many years later that one of their ilk had been elected President of the USA...

I seem to recall covering that in history, long before the Internet. Primary and secondary evidence etc. and in English, called 'comprehension' where you read a few paragraphs and had to answer questions about them to show you understood them.

I've little knowledge of what they teach now but I always felt a lot of my education was very academic and focussed on the (at the time) small percentage of those who went into further and higher education, despite going to a comprehensive school. It doesn't seem to have changed that much, from the brief conversations I've had with my nephew recently, and it seems to be heavily biased towards teaching kids to pass exams rather than educating them for a life beyond school.

 

[HodgysBrokenThumb]

I seem to recall covering that in history, long before the Internet. Primary and secondary evidence etc. and in English, called 'comprehension' where you read a few paragraphs and had to answer questions about them to show you understood them.

I've little knowledge of what they teach now but I always felt a lot of my education was very academic and focussed on the (at the time) small percentage of those who went into further and higher education, despite going to a comprehensive school. It doesn't seem to have changed that much, from the brief conversations I've had with my nephew recently, and it seems to be heavily biased towards teaching kids to pass exams rather than educating them for a life beyond school.

I think learning to recognise what people mean when they write or speak is less elitist now; access to the Internet is so widespread. Understanding other people's motives can include 'who is this person who wants my bank account details and why do they want them?' The issue of trust is crucial right across the online world.

 

[Darthblade]

During our wearing of sack-cloth and beating ourselves with birch twigs as self punishment for the football chants we may have sung ........ have we stopped to consider that in the majority of cases, these chants which we are now "labelling" with every "ist" word that has been created, were simply created as a way to try to put a (good) player off their game.

I don't believe that football is a monstrous political machine, I don't believe it is subversive, or even prejudiced in the vast majority of cases. I think that football supporters over the years simply created chants, often aimed at specific players ...... and the purpose was to put them off their game if possible and I don't think that its much more complex than that in the majority of cases.

These chants are never likely to be positive, heart-warming, friendly non-offensive or polite by their very nature. For example; our opponents never sang "Tony Curry's far too good for us please stop playing so well"; or Deano you're a god please don't put the ball in our net today" !!

Chants about Gordon Strachan's red hair, Robbie Fowler snorting coke, Paul Merson being over-portly, Ian Dowie not being so handsome and the regular issue of hurling Mars bars at Gazza come to mind.

In short ...... I don't think that the hate and bile that the PC brigade paint the picture of is necessarily the typical football supporter's chief intention in all this convoluted conspiracy theory ...... its just done to put other players off. Nothing more complex or psychologically deep than that !

In the same way that supporters sing praise (sometimes false) regarding their own player's prowess or capabilities; for example; feeding the Goat and he will score, Lukaku's alleged manhood and Couttsy never relinquishing possession of the ball.

I think that the vast majority of football supporters can put away their sack-cloth shirts and birch twigs, suspend the self-flagellation and simply get on with supporting their team, safe in the knowledge that they will CERTAINLY offend some people with their songs whilst supporting their team, however, the majority of people that they will offend will be offended anyway by something else in everyday life.

UTB & FTP