Response to Amad Diallo song plea is about what kind of a club Sunderland want to be
Those of us who confidently declared we would never allow ourselves to love another Sunderland loan player again had not reckoned with Amad Diallo.
It was another fine performance from Amad as Sunderland beat Millwall 3-0. He scored the first and played a big part in the build-up to the second, and he was generally a joy to watch.
After his first goal, a section of Sunderland supporters in the Stadium of Light burst into song in his honour. It has become a regular occurrence given his recent performances. However, this time it was different – because he had specifically asked fans not to do it.
"Sunderland fans I've had an amazing time so far," Amad said in a message posted on the club’s social media channels. "I love your energy and having you sing my name is incredible.
"But we need to be respectful. Let's change the song, keep the noise and move forward together."
There isn’t really any need at this point to say what the chant is or examine whether or not it should be offensive to anyone. It’s a total irrelevance. I mean it literally doesn’t matter, because it’s not our judgement to make. The fact it is happening in football is largely irrelevant too.
It doesn't even matter, in fact, that Amad has said anything about the chant, or if his words could be interpreted in another way. Racial profiling is potentially offensive to anyone who observes it, not just the target of it.
The crucial part is that someone has told fans that something they are chanting, that is at the very least patently racially insensitive, is offensive to them and not ‘respectful.’
It really becomes, then, a simple question of whether we want to offend someone or sing a particular song at a football match. Or, to put it another way, whether a daft chant at a football match is so important that it’s worth offending someone and trashing the club's image over.
It’s really no more complicated than that. It’s not about politics, before people demand that football and politics be kept apart (usually while they are the ones dragging politics into it). It is about freedom of speech, but only in the sense that we are free to choose whether or not we want to knowingly offend someone with a racially insensitive chant.
It is also about what kind of a club we want to be though, too, and be seen as. There are no greater representatives for Sunderland than the fans, and the last five years or so have proven it. As Sunderland sank to new historical depths, the quality of the support became literally the only source of any pride for the whole club.
The football was dire, but the fans were defiantly boisterous. The more the club fell away from the spotlight, the more noise the fans made to make sure it could only ever be out of sight within the football world, never out of mind. The darker and longer the night became, the more inevitable the dawn because no club with THIS brilliant a support can ever be kept in shadow. That is Sunderland.
IMAGO
Sunderland is passion, pride, honest endeavour and unfailing loyalty to anyone who buys into it. It’s about inclusivity and welcoming all those who want to be belong here. It has always been about looking after our own and defending our own because, frankly, if we don't then more of often than not no one else will be going into bat for us.
It is what got under Niall Quinn’s skin. It’s tens of thousands of pounds raised by the club’s fans every year for the Sunderland Soup Kitchen, or filling Wembley for the Checkatrade Trophy final in the darkest chapter of our entire history and making it a better-attended sporting event than the Super Bowl that year – and every other year this century except one.
That’s an identity. It’s our identity, and it has been hard earned over a period of more than 100 years and handed down to us. It deserves far more respect than to be compromised to preserve a racially stereotyping chant that the player it’s directed at doesn’t even want.
I hope, sincerely, that fans singing the Amad song after his goal against Millwall only did so because his request was released so close to kick-off that they had not seen it. That was my initial suspicion, although I am sorry to say that faith has been slightly rocked by some social media interactions since.
'It's just a chant,' I've been told, 'no big deal surely?!' Exactly, so let it go. SIng something else. You know, one of the countless ones that don't risk offending someone and dragging the club's image through the mud. One of those.
Ultimately, I suppose time will tell. From this, we will either prove ourselves an inclusive football club which values compassion more than it does a song, or a football club that knowingly sings racially insensitive songs to a black footballer, and it won’t matter one jot if it’s just a minority of fans doing it.