The Twelfth Man: Among the Degenerates

It's not often I watch my football team win and feel bad. The sensation is even less familiar when watching them win a semi-final against their sworn enemies. But walking from the stadium after the match I felt guilt and discomfort that I'd never before felt.

They say that football is the great leveller of men: That the game unites rich and poor, black and white, even men and women. Everyone gets together behind their team and put their differences behind them for ninety minutes of camaraderie. Of course, this is true to the extent that the stand full of people pretend not to loath one another for the length of the match, gritting their teeth and arguing in their own heads… But hell, that's camaraderie for you, the illusion of friendship, the self-imposed hardship of tolerance.

The problem with football is that while it unites all, the majority of supporters are the swinish rabble that raise hell in the ground and outside, the filthy and morally derelict scheme-dwelling minks who should by all rights not be allowed to leave their rank homes until carted out as putrid corpses destined for the crematorium.

These are the vocal fans, the ones most call the true supporters. These are the ones for whom football is getting drunk and abusive and making sure that the other fans in the ground cannot fully enjoy the match, regardless of how much of a success the game is for the team.

These wretched scumbags are the racist, sexist, ignorant filth that occupy eighty percent of the seats in the stadium, buy most of the merchandise, cheer and boo the loudest, and basically fill the club kitty with the most ill-deserved giro-scrounged cash.

And sometimes, they are the ones that win the game.



On the 5th of February I travelled to Tynecastle with my two brothers and my dad to watch Dundee Utd play Aberdeen. We had all been going to the football for years, as well as of course watching on TV, and knew the game inside out, good and bad, pretty and ugly. One thing we weren't generally familiar with until this season, however, was the quality of Dundee Utd – a team who were now the third best in the country and outclassing most opposition.

Having gone to most league matches during the season, it was only fitting we follow Utd to Edinburgh for the semi-final of the CIS League Cup, against the bitterest of enemies, the infamous Sheep-Shaggers of the North.

Atmosphere at games against the Dons is rarely pleasant, but it was only in this match that I realised just how disgraceful our own fans could be. I'd always known my own preferences had biased me against the behaviour of Utd players and fans, but it's easy to ignore in the strange and terrible world of football.


As we walked along Gorgie Street to the stadium, a bus pulled by in heavy traffic, and the filth on board began thumping the glass and screaming like demented and tortured half-beings. They were the Sheep-Shaggers, the lower rungs of the northern regions of society. They were drunk and ignorant and in their thousands, an intimidating sight. The noise they produced from within their motorised cage was terrifying. I felt as though the windows might break at any moment, sending shards of glass and scummy Aberdonians into the street to wreak some kind of mad havoc.

But we persevered and pushed through the crowds to the stadium, past the mounted police and hoards of security. I tried to keep my head down, avoiding eye contact with the Dundonian element – the fans of my own team, whom constituted an unpleasant crowd, but from whose wrath one could be spared by wearing liberal amounts of orange and black.

Into the stadium and up the steep banks of Tynecastle's sharply inclining stands. The four of us took our seats behind a goal, half way up the stand, in fantastic position to see the whole pitch. We were sitting behind two mothers and their two daughters, in what seemed a predominantly family zone.

I saw two men stagger up the stairs in a uniquely Dundonian manner. They were not drunk, as far as I could tell, but so primitive and inbred that they seemed to have trouble navigating such processes as walking, talking and anything not cherished by neds. Both of them swung their arms out wide like primates and Oasis fans, keeping their heads down but eyes up, dull, and darting around full of hate. One wore, predictably, an orange and grey tracksuit, with cheap jeans and expensive boots. His head was shaven and his eyes bulged in a way that betrayed his hideous conception and poor upbringing, and a wilful predilection towards ignorance and violence. His friend looked less inbred and ignorant, but through his eyes came the daggers of hate, aimed every which way. He was greying and more conservatively dressed in a turd brown jersey and more expensive jeans.

I took an immediate loathing to both of these beasts. There was nothing in either of their faces that told me I'd feel sorry to see them tumble back down the stairs and break their necks. In fact, there was nothing in their faces I could see that implied they were truly part of the human race, but rather of that frequently occurring genetic mishap that seems to be sweeping Britain, creating a race of mentally retarded psychopaths, born into football colours and happy-slapping dreams of Buckfast and Burberry. I know from experience that these people have none of the qualities men have for millennia argued separate humans from animals, and that they should be avoided like clichés and the plague.

Predictably, they sat behind us. Instead of walking around the aisles and taking their seats in a civilised manner, they pushed me to the side and jumped over my seat and into theirs, and I knew then that they had such disregard for actual people that they'd spend the rest of the match jumping up and down the stand, walking about purely for the joy of getting in people's way and causing hassle.

The game began and the atmosphere became pleasant, save for the half-wits behind us, chanting the usual stream of moronic abuse whenever one of our players would make what the 'experts' deemed a mistake. Utd dominated the game early, and our keeper was in front of us, reaping our cheers of the crowd.

Out of the blue, Aberdeen scored a goal and half of our supporters cheered Utd on to get one back, while half began booing and hurling abuse aimlessly. The fuckwit inbreds behind us began throwing racial abuse, which was something I hadn't heard at a football game in several years. Of course, a few politically incorrect statements are normal, and I'd say they're not a big deal. But this was different.

"Ya fuckin' fruit pickers, get oot a Scotland! No fuckin' monkeys in Scotland! Fuckin' ching-chong chinkie slanty eyes, ken? Fuck off, like!"

The abuse was ridiculous and almost aimless. There were no non-white players on the Aberdeen side, so I assumed most of the racism was aimed at our own team, which included Polish and African players. Yet no one seemed to take a particular offence to this unnecessary tirade against Dundee Utd.

Certainly there was an unpleasant air of silence in the immediate area around the two ugly delinquents. It seemed as though the other fans could sense the idiotic violence within them and kept quiet so as to avoid trouble. My family and I countered slightly by engaging in indirect argument with the racist degenerates, deliberately cheering Utd on when a mistake was made, making positive counterpoints to the racist putdowns. But we didn't dare insight physical confrontation with the neds.

Even the police and stewards patrolling the stand ignored their moronic banter.


United equalised before half-time through Darren Dods, and regained the upper hand through their superior form. Aberdeen looked sure to lose.

When the second half began, the Aberdeen keeper, Jamie Langfield, took his place in the goals in front of the Utd fans. Before long he was pelted with objects from the crowd and it seemed that myself and my family were the only people in the stand outraged at such behaviour. Even the two stewards below us were laughing as the keeper stood stupidly, showered in chips and cups.

Half the crowd chanted vile abuse at Langfield, who looked utterly terrified, and half the crowd laughed and jeered on the primitives that thought it necessary to jeopardise their own team's match. It was truly sickening to watch, as although the objects were all soft and not liable to cause injury, Langfield was standing in front of thousands of people for whom violence is no big deal, looking like a man facing death, not knowing whether the next object to hit his head will be a cold chip or a glass bottle. Every now and then he turned and looked sheepishly at the crowd, who in unison belted out his name, followed by various threats.

The sharp banks of the stadium meant that the stands rose straight up from the edges of the pitch, so that even a person in the highest seat could feasibly have thrown an object and landed it on the grass. Everyone in the stand was able to look down at the keeper and bark insult from up high.

The referee at one point ran over and picked up a cup of coffee that had missed Langfield's shoulder, and he carried it off the pitch before running back to the halfway line, leaving the frightened goalkeeper to stand on his own, directly below the gallery of malicious scum that were getting more and more enthused by their own barbaric actions and the obvious unwillingness of the referee, the stewards, or the police, to intervene.

It was like walking past a school and seeing a mob of vicious teenagers tormenting a small child. It doesn't matter whether the child gets beaten or not, but rather that the child is so terrified by the prospect that he can barely stand. The humiliation is as painful as any beating.

When Langfield took his first goalkick in front of the rabid crowd, he slipped and fell on his ass, and then proceeded to stand on the edge of the eighteen yard box, too frightened to move any closer to the by-line.

A few minutes later, a defender passed the ball back to the keeper, whose legs were constantly trembling, and Langfield swung and missed and the ball went out for a corner. When the corner was swung in, Langfield, even surrounded by his own defenders, was unable to muster the strength to intervene, and Kalvenes headed the ball in to give Utd the lead.

I cheered and applauded for Utd were the better team, but I knew that even though they would have won on their own terms in the end, the score was 2-1 purely because the fans had intimidated a goalkeeper into a state of utter helplessness.

I watched as more shaven-headed scumbag scheme-dwellers ran down from the upper seats and jumped on the barriers and security fences, endangering their own worthless lives and the lives of others, while the female security staff, looking entirely baffled and overwhelmed by the crazed maniacs before them, stood stupid and smiling and looking around so as to appear not as useless as they in fact were.

With my mind I willed the biggest, ugliest and most drunken of the louts to fall head first over the barrier on which he bounced, down into the stairwell below. The fall probably wouldn't kill him, but you never know… Sometimes we get lucky.

The torrent of abuse from behind continued as the two tinks whom had come to sully my appreciation of the match from the very start, continued to chant their vile racist insults, one of them explaining that "Em'm no racist against a monkey in Utd shirt, but em'm racist against 'em everywhere else." To which the other replied: "Eh dae ken how they let 'em play for us anyhow!"

A big chav with scars across his face walked up the steps towards us, and engaged in mind-numbing nedchat with the pair behind, about a fight in Dundee a few nights before. The new ned was boasting about his scars and how he had needed stitches in his face after fighting someone because they supported a different team. Probably Dundee. As he leaned over to speak closer to his despicable mirror images, his tracksuit touched the side of my face and obscured my view of part of the pitch and I kept shaking my head, getting angrier and angrier, looking loathsomely at the hapless stewards, wishing they'd come remove this filthy piece of shit from my sight. I wanted more than anything to tell him to fuck off, or maybe just grab him and throw him down the stairs to the death he deserve simply for living such a boastfully pathetic and vitriolic existence… But evidently he was a fighter and I wouldn't have lasted more than a few seconds. If I had done, I would have been thrown out and missed the rest of what was to be an epic, though tarnished, victory.

So I sat and stewed in my own rage, willing the fuckers all to be run down by buses on their respective ways home. I still to this day hope at least one of them died at the wheels of a heavy vehicle. Don't try and tell me he wouldn't have deserved it.

So I sat and watched the rest of the match, trying desperately to enjoy the football. The Aberdeen keeper was no longer subject to a barrage of thrown objects, but the chants about his mother and murder continued, culminating in a third goal for Utd.

When Conway bagged the third, the atmosphere in the Utd end became more jubilant and less violent, with the cheers no longer centring around threats against Aberdeen players, but in celebration of the Utd manager and chairman. "There's only one Eddie Thompson!" and "Craig Levein's tangerine army!" being too favourites. I was briefly reminded of the atmosphere in the cup final at Hampden a few years earlier, which had temporarily restored my faith in football fans and Dundonians, after the Utd fans actually cheers their losing team off the pitch for a good effort.

The tracky-tink behind me suddenly jumped out of his seat and onto mine as I got up to celebrate the fourth, a howler by Langfield, and crushed my leg. As he belted down the stairs, I swung my leg out to trip him, hoping he'd go head first and break his fucking rancid neck. Unfortunately, he was too quick, having probably spent most of his life running from police and fights.


After the match we wandered back to the car, near Princes Street. We discussed the reprehensible behaviour of the Utd fans and the magnificent performance of the players, speaking loudly so as to antagonise the swarming mass of putrid inbred neds heading back to the City of Recovery.

The chanting continued as the group marauded towards the transport hubs of the city, kicking over bins and banging on windows. "Tell yer ma, yer ma! Put the champagne on ice! We're going to Hampden twice! Tell yer ma, yer ma!"

Behind us walked two well-spoken Aberdeen fans, saying much the same as us. They lamented the referee's performance, which we had noted earlier in the match as poor and leaning in favour of Aberdeen. "It was like playing against twelve men," one of them said, to which I turned and replied "Thirteen if you count the state of our crowd."

They chastised their own fans for poor behaviour, as it turned out the Aberdeen support had been pelting Lukasz Zaluska with coins and generally behaving like crack-head children. The last thing on their mind was the score-line, which they admitted was deserved through the Dons' lacklustre performance and the excellent Utd form.

In the end, Dundee Utd would be making their way to Hampden at the end of a fantastic season, and no doubt the unpleasantries of Tynecastle's seething pit of hate would be forgotten.