It's time football stood up to this arrogant posturing

By Patrick Collins for The Mail on Sunday
Updated: 04:18 EST, 22 January 2012

The family is about to enjoy an evening at the theatre. Expectations are high, the children are excited and the seats are expensive; orchestra stalls, 10 rows back.

The house lights fall, the curtain ascends … and, as one, the first nine rows rise to their feet.

Unable to see the stage, you protest to the people in front. Most ignore you, some respond with aggressive threats.

You complain to the attendants and they shrug helplessly. So you tolerate this wretched state of affairs until the interval, then you force your way out with the children in tears.

They insist they will never return and you feel much the same. Later, you contact the theatre manager to demand your money back.

He informs you that refunds are against company policy. It is a grotesque fantasy, of course.

For if the performing arts conducted their affairs in this fashion, then the entire industry would be dead within months. Yet this is precisely what is happening on a weekly basis in the most celebrated arenas of English football.

This newspaper receives regular reports of bitterly disappointed children from parents who feel humiliated by their failure to deliver the treat they had promised. Increasingly, young people are being excluded from the game by the steepling cost of tickets, and such treatment will alienate them still further.

The same may be said of the elderly, those who have come expecting a seat and may be too frail for the extended discomfort of standing. It is a quite disgraceful state of affairs and this time the blame does not lie with the clubs, the FA, the Premier League or any of the usual suspects.

Instead, it lies with the fans themselves; or, at least, with that selfish, doltish element which regards the right to stand at football matches as one of the sacrosanct civil liberties. 'I stand, therefore I am,' is their arrogant assertion.

Those who challenge it will be shouted down, or worse. And the fact that a small child or an elderly gentleman can't see a thing is merely regrettable. The problem is worse with the away fans, who tend to possess a strange sense of entitlement.

The fact that they have travelled to the match apparently entitles them to chant what they choose, insult whom they please and stand from start to finish in a curious show of macho posturing. Some clubs, Manchester United spring to mind, have had their away ticket allocations cut as a result of these transgressions.

A few home clubs have a policy of ejecting offenders but the numbers are large and the disruption considerable. Enforcement is desperately difficult. Yet the dangers are obvious.

Safety certificates are issued on the basis that a ground is suitable for sitting rather than standing. And to stand in huge numbers in the precarious channels of steeply sloped stadia is to invite catastrophe.

But there is a widespread, and slightly puzzling, desire to stand at football matches, and the news that Aston Villa are prepared to examine a safe-standing section at Villa Park has opened up intriguing possibilities.

The idea is enthusiastically endorsed by the Football Supporters' Federation and would be based on the example of Germany's Bundesliga, where it has worked safely and effectively. The advantages would include cheaper tickets and a greater number of younger fans, and clearly the scheme would have little in common with the dangerous, God-forsaken English football grounds of the Eighties.

But, inevitably, any such project would evoke appalling memories of the Hillsborough tragedy when 96 lives were lost. In such an atmosphere - and given the opposition of police, politicians and the Premier League - the arguments for standing, however sensitively submitted, would be unlikely to succeed.

Yet the present situation is clearly untenable and potentially disastrous. Everybody can recognise the dilemma but nobody offers a persuasive solution.

Instead, we share a vague, worthy and wholly improbable desire for a concerted change of attitude by a chunk of the nation's fans. Football is facing many pressing problems, but the scourge of illicit standing is as urgent as any.

It is high time it was confronted and conquered, before the game fritters a fresh generation of followers.

Tevez just doing what comes naturally

Carlos Tevez is a footballer. The point is worth making, since most of us had forgotten.

We imagined he was a brilliant illusionist, who had spent three months doing nothing while being paid around £225,000 every week.

But no, Tevez is a footballer, who hasn't kicked a ball since that celebrated misunderstanding in Munich last September.

In the intervening months, he seems to have done a spot of training and a good deal of sulking. Not to mention an immoderate amount of earning.

Meanwhile, his 'adviser', the much-loved Kia Joorabchian, tramps the mean streets of Paris and Milan to see if someone, somewhere will pay the price for his client. It is a touching tale.

And Roberto Mancini feels his pain. The Manchester City manager remarked recently that it was time for Tevez to get back to doing what he does best.

Strange. Some of us thought he was already doing just that.

Audley is back for his future

Fourteen months have passed since that Manchester evening when Audley Harrison did battle with David Haye.

In truth, it was less a battle, more a tiff. It lasted three rounds, and Audley's shining moment came when he very nearly landed a jab in round two.

Now, as we were to discover from his abject concession to Wladimir Klitschko, Haye himself possesses scant taste for his painful profession.

Yet, compared with Harrison, he has the fighting heart of a Rocky Marciano.

After the Haye fiasco, it was generally assumed that Audley's boxing career had been terminated by public demand.

He enjoyed life as a C-list celebrity and he attacked his role in Strictly Come Dancing with splendidly untypical aggression.

But some small part of him was hankering for the prize ring, for those rousing nights when they would pay him oceans of money for hanging around and looking mean. And so he is coming back.

In mid-April, at the Brentwood Centre, the Madison Square Garden of suburban Essex, Harrison will take on somebody called Ali Adams for something called the International Masters Heavyweight title.

It's not for the money. No, it's because, at 40, Audley Harrison has things to prove.

As he says: 'I intend to show that I still have a future in this game.' And here's the depressing truth: given the farcical state of professional boxing, he's probably right.

PS

Joey Barton, the polymath of Loftus Road, tweets his contempt for Neil Warnock.

He advises him to 'look in the mirror, mate' and delivers the deathless line: 'If u live by the sword, u die by it.'

Warnock, in the course of a self-pitying television interview, bemoans his persecution by social media: 'It's almost like slowly poisoning somebody.'

This is the kind of exchange which football calls 'a mind game'.

And, as Barton and Warnock demonstrate, anybody can play. However ill-equipped.