Homophobia the giant pink elephant in the room

PREMIER LEAGUE:The gay cause requires a top player to come out and defy the rampant prejudice, writes ANDREW FIFIELD

IF THE name Trevor Morley means anything to you, it probably isn’t because he scored 149 goals in 445 career appearances or that he is now, bizarrely, something of a cult figure in Norway, where he works as a television pundit and runs a shelter.

Instead, he is remembered in English footballing folklore for a wildly apocryphal tale which suggested he had been stabbed by his wife after she discovered him in bed with Ian Bishop, his former team-mate at West Ham. It was a story guaranteed to generate giggles wherever football fans gathered to gossip, no matter how far-fetched it seemed, and yet – as if often the case – there was a dark side to the whispers.

“The rumours about me being gay killed me for a while,” Morley said in an interview with Ex, a West Ham fanzine, last week. “I’ve got nothing against gays but it’s not nice to be called a homosexual when you aren’t. It ruined my football. I’d go out onto the field and hide. I didn’t want to be there and hearing comments from some West Ham fans was hard to take.”

Morley’s interview is well worth reading, not least because it is one of the few examples of a footballer openly addressing football’s relationship with homosexuality, even if it is in the context of a bemused denial.

This, in itself, is something of a revelation. For most players and officials in the English game, homophobia is the giant pink elephant in the room – something to be studiously ignored at all costs. Hence the depressing realisation that the neanderthal attitudes which prevailed when Morley was being baited are still flourishing more than a decade on.

The failure to adequately tackle anti-gay attitudes remains one of the greatest stains on the game’s character and one of the most bemusing, especially when set against the giant strides taken to combat racism and hooliganism.

While the latter has been largely, if not entirely, stamped out, homophobia continues to abound – either in the kind of poisonous whispering campaign that soured Morley’s career and which has since been visited upon several high-profile Premier League players, or in the boorish chants which are bellowed at high volume from stadia up and down the land on a weekly basis.

We’ve all heard them: “Does your boyfriend know you’re here?”, “[insert name here] takes it up the arse” or, still more lovably, the chant directed at Sol Campbell by Tottenham fans which ends with the suggestion that the player is a “Judas **** with HIV”. At least airings of the latter recently lead to a handful of fans being given criminal sentences; the rest go largely unpunished.

Ordinarily, the dismal lack of success in combating this spiteful strand of prejudice would be marked down as yet another calamity committed by the Football Association, whose standing in the eyes of the public has now sunk so low that apparently even the flailing British Labour government feels able to give it a good kicking.

But, for once, the FA is not to blame. True, none of the smattering of initiatives launched in recent years appears to have had any palpable impact, with a recent survey of 2,000 supporters, players and executives by Stonewall, the gay rights pressure group, finding that over half of those questioned believed the authorities were not doing enough to combat the problem.

However, this is one issue which calls for leadership from the sharp end, rather than an office at Wembley.

The FA can produce as many educational videos and snazzily-marketed awareness campaigns as it likes and none of it will make as much impact as one of the game’s A-listers making their own stand by bringing a currently taboo subject into the realm of public debate.

Ideally, this would be in the form of a gay Premier League footballer coming out and publicly defying those who still insist that professional football just doesn’t get up to this kind of thing, although that might be a forlorn hope.

The tragic fate of the only high-profile English footballer ever to admit his sexuality, Justin Fashanu, is a significant deterrent in itself, while the determinedly macho culture that perpetuates in the Premier League – the one that leads Rio Ferdinand to use the word “faggot” on live radio or Robbie Fowler to waggle his backside at the heterosexual Graeme Le Saux – would probably rule out the chances of a sympathetic response from within the dressing room.

Either way, it is clear the gay cause is crying out for a standard-bearer, someone courageous enough to withstand the sneering and smutty innuendo that would inevitably greet their stance. Otherwise, it will be condemned to exist in football’s shadows forever.