Fair point. I think Dier has been more or less equally as piss poor as Davinson. But he has had miles of rope. Dav hasn't.
-
The Fighting Cock is a forum for fans of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Here you can discuss Spurs latest matches, our squad, tactics and any transfer news surrounding the club. Registration gives you access to all our forums (including 'Off Topic' discussion) and removes most of the adverts (you can remove them all via an account upgrade). You're here now, you might as well...
Ex-Spurs Player Davinson Sanchez
- Thread starter Totti
- Start date
Latest Spurs videos from Sky Sports
Fair point. I think Dier has been more or less equally as piss poor as Davinson. But he has had miles of rope. Dav hasn't.
can't agree that Dier & Davinson have been at the same bad level, Sanchez seems to fall over his feet a couple of times every time he plays (he only gets short pitch time)
Sanchez for me is a really poor player, watch him move forward with the ball he stops then looks awkward in passing the ball
but Since Monday(due to this thread) I can see that it does look and feels like its " unconscious bias"
The same Dier who had to wade into the west stand to defend a family member from abuse he and Dier were getting?
Have a look at the Liverpool match thread and the Dier thread and your post doesn’t really corroborate what’s in there.
There is no racist angle to it. It’s just two consistangly under performing players who should have left the clubs years ago. People are just looking for something that isn’t there.
People will always feel uncomfortable to confront their biases.
It’s part of human nature
2+2 isn't 5 .
Dier getting more rope doesn't mean that booing Sanchez was racially motivated by the large majority of people. Life is complicated. Being pissed off with Levy and mainly Conte subbing Sanchez in when we were chasing Milan was the main motivation for Sanchez getting booed.
2+2 = 4
Articles that create an angle around racial division do get more clicks and interaction on social media so editors are incentivised to write them and publishers are more incentivized to publish them.
Apologies if that doesn't fit the naivety of your world view.
Racist world views tend to be reductionist so as to ignore systemic facts.
Sanchez being booed, on its own, doesn't have to be racially motivated. The fact that Dier has not been booed, for similarly awful performances (of which he's had several this season) while Dav was booed is evidence of systemic racism.
It really isn't.
Your argument is evidence that you haven't really thought this through and instead you are searching for anything to back up your determination to find racism where it isn't. This is how systematic racial divisions grow.
Unfortunately, this inadvertently makes you racist.
Deleted 15229
Guest
If the fuckwit twins Romero and Dier don't get booed, then you have to start vwondering
After Tottenham Hotspur’s Davinson Sanchezwas booed by his own fans last Saturday, The Athletic discussed on the View From The Lane podcast whether there was an element of unconscious racial bias to how he was treated.
Sanchez follows Emerson Royal and Tanguy Ndombele being booed by Spurs fans in the past 15 months.
It’s an uncomfortable subject and no one is suggesting the fans who booed Sanchez and/or Royal and Ndombele are ipso facto racist.
But it was a discomfiting event and, on the View From The Lane, I was aware that as four white men we weren’t necessarily the best people to talk about unconscious bias and these issues.
So The Athletic assembled a panel to discuss some of the themes arising from what happened at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium last weekend:
- Frank Nouble — former West Ham, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Ipswich Town striker. Currently at National League side Torquay United.
- Leon Mann MBE — consultant, interviewer and filmmaker, who has spent his career championing equal opportunity within the football industry, co-founding the Football Blacklist in 2008 prior to setting up the Black Collection of Media in Sport (BCOMS) in 2009.
- Carl Anka — staff writer at The Athleticand BCOMS mentor.
Eccleshare: This conversation has been prompted by what happened last Saturday at Spurs, but it’s a lot broader than that. It’s about unconscious bias and whether black players are treated differently from white ones and why that might be. How do you all see this and do you think black players are treated differently?
Mann: I think you need to break it down in terms of how society sees black people. How society in this country sees black footballers, the way we talk about black footballers — we see it with the commentators’ study. It’s very based on physicality. There are lots of references to natural ability. With black athletes, it’s often about the physical attributes — are you strong, are you fast? So there’s a disappointment if you have a black player who is not fast, who is not strong.
And then we always lean into this idea about black players doing what they can because of natural ability as opposed to recognition of their hard work or perseverance. So if you don’t have that recognition, then how you view somebody is not anchored in respect. And if you don’t have that respect, then actually it turns into what I think we see playing out with the approach to many black footballers; this view that you don’t look like you’re putting much effort in.
And then think about white players who seemingly don’t put much effort in. Chris Waddle, Dimitar Berbatov, Matt Le Tissier etc. They don’t exactly put in a shift but they can do things nobody else can do. And that’s why we turn up and we love them and we respect them. And we say, ‘You know what, I don’t really want you running backwards as fast as you can because actually, I want you in the places where you can affect the game’, and we accept that. But I think sometimes we don’t apply that same logic to certain footballers.
Nouble: I remember one manager used the word “lazy” a lot. I was outside his office and I could hear he was talking about me and what he was saying. He didn’t realise I could hear him. He didn’t say anything horrible, but later on, as I got older, I realised some of the ignorance of certain words he was using. He said to one of his coaches: “That’s the problem with these youngsters, they’re lazy. They don’t want to do extras.” He kept on using the term lazy and saying these are the attitudes of these young players that come from London — these were the specific words he used.
I’ve never said anything about this before, but as I’ve got older, you start to realise these ignorant comments that are frustrating to hear.
As a black player, it’s like you have to show that it means much more to you. You have to do almost two times the effort than if your name was Tony or Harry.
Whether you’re Davinson Sanchez or whoever, I think that’s always going to be the case.
Eccleshare: Ndombele is a good example of that “lazy” stereotype you mention — he was routinely called that. And though in very different circumstances from Sanchez (Ndombele slowly left the pitch when Spurs were losing to Morecambe in the FA Cup), he too was booed by the Spurs fans.
Anka: Very often when we have discussions about football fans and their aggression towards black football players, we hear what I call the “David Beckham defence”.
The argument that: ‘They hung effigies of David Beckham when he kicked an Argentina player’. OK, that was a memorable moment, but it happened in 1998. So let’s get the David Beckham defence out of the way. If you bring up something that happened way before a number of Premier League football players were even born, it’s not really that relevant to what we’re talking about today.
Let’s also get the ‘Harry Maguire defence’ out the way because yes, he does receive a disproportionate amount of censure and a particularly vociferous and visceral hatred sometimes. We’re not saying white football players don’t receive appalling abuse.
But this conversation is about the appalling abuse that black football players get and whether or not that abuse is to a different degree of aggression because of their skin colour.
Mann: With Sanchez, I am a Tottenham fan and I was there last Saturday. Davinson is not in great form, he hasn’t got much confidence. But I think when we start to ridicule a player like that… and there are racial undertones which people will be probably unaware of, in my view that is a dangerous situation. I do think there are a lot of subconscious things going on.
And I do think that absolutely — and forget Tottenham Hotspur, forget Davinson — black players get less patience and less time based on what society puts on us as black people and particularly black athletes.
And I’m not challenging the fans around me on these things because I feel like, ‘Oh god, what am I going to open up here?’ And why should I have to? Because I’m a black guy going to football, I have to explain and break down things about society to people?
Eccleshare: On the subject of fans saying uncomfortable things at grounds, I’d really recommend Jay Harris’ piece on fans singing about the size of black players’ penises.
Nouble: The situation with Sanchez and the booing, that’s been going on for years, and it’s about culture. At grounds up and down the country, the majority of the fans are white and it’s also about how players are represented in the media.
Look at Paul Pogba, someone I’m sure many people are tired of hearing about. But why are they tired of him being used as an example? Because it’s correct. Change your hairstyle as a black player and suddenly it’s ‘you’re not concentrating on your game or the next match’. Make a few bad passes and it’s ‘what are you doing in your social life?’.
I think the media is very powerful. So I think it’s important that we have conversations like we’re having today. But it needs to be a constant thing, so it’s in the back of people’s minds. So people ask: why am I actually singing certain songs that might make people uncomfortable?
That’s why we need constant conversations — it’s the only way we can get even a one per cent change in one stadium.
With booing players, whether they’re black or white, I actually don’t mind that part, but the picking on certain players when they’re not performing is definitely colour-based, in my opinion.
Anka: Frank’s talked there about depictions in the media. I’m a full-time sports journalist, working in the United Kingdom, covering football. And I’m black. There are not many people like me. On an average game I cover, I will most likely meet a black steward and have my bag checked by a black person who is on a zero-hour contract. Then I’ll get to the press box and boom, there are so few black journalists other than me.
And that creates a very interesting way you look at football because, by contrast, you’ve got a lot of black football players in the Premier League (43 per cent are non-white).
Broadly, I think your average Premier League fan is aware of overt, conscious racism. Most fans here understand why you shouldn’t call a black football player a ‘monkey’. Where I think football in the UK is not great is the insidious forms of racism, or what my friends and I often refer to as “plausible deniability racism”.
The kind where Frank turns up at a new club for training and they go, ‘Oh, you must be quick’. And he’s not even run yet. That’s racial bias, just as anything that raises the idea that we might be intelligent is often confusing. Occasionally, I encounter disagreement with a particular kind of fan where the point of contention is not what I’ve said, but that I’m the person who said it. Because to admit that I might know what I’m talking about would be to admit that a black person could be as intelligent as you are. You think I can’t possibly be as smart as you.
And I think we need to bring that to Sanchez and the booing.
I think the booing comes from, as Leon said: if you don’t respect that person, their hard work, if you don’t believe that person is a human being in the same way you think you’re a human being, then you think it’s OK to boo them.
Eccleshare: That dehumanising aspect has also happened with Maguire to an extent and is why people think they can boo him the way they do.
What you’re saying about being viewed as not intelligent because of your skin colour is something I think we also see with footballers. And linking it back to Sanchez, the subconscious idea that black people aren’t intelligent enough to be centre-backs. That they’re accident-prone.
Anka: I am a child of the 1990s and I am old enough to remember the racist stereotype that you can’t have two black centre-backs. If you have a black centre-back the stereotype was that you needed a white centre-back next to him because black centre-backs were prone to concentration lapses. They go missing.
Eccleshare: Right, and I think there’s a view in this country that the platonic ideal of a centre-back is Anglo-Saxon, white, heads everything away — unless your name’s Harry Maguire. It’s part of the reason I think Rio Ferdinand when he was younger was accused of having lapses of concentration. On the other side of the coin, I think someone like Rob Holding, who, without wanting to be harsh, is out of his depth in a team pushing for the title. He gets something of a pass because he looks and sounds like how we think a centre-back should.
A lot of people will disagree with all of this, but how do we change some of the perceptions that exist, consciously or unconsciously, about black players?
Mann: Representation is a massive part of it. Just to break down the numbers a little bit: 43 per cent of the Premier League’s players are black, according to the Black Footballers Partnership research. That number was up at 52 per cent one weekend a few weeks ago, so the black community that weekend drove the majority of money into a multi-billion-pound league.
Now, keep with me on this one, how many black directors do you think there are across the 20 Premier League clubs? One.
Not one CEO, not one manager at the moment. Not one director of football, not one owner.
It tells you how people feel about a group of people. For there to be only one black board member across every single Premier League club tells you that we are happy to have black athletes run and entertain people, but we are not happy to have black people control money, control ideas, control strategy.
Now, when you think about that, that is a real problem. And if we include the EFL (English Football League), we’ve got one black director of football: Les Ferdinand at QPR. We’ve got one black owner: Ben Robinson at Burton Albion, who most people are unaware he’s black because he’s quite fair-skinned. And at Wrexham in the National League there’s Fleur Robinson, who’s mixed race, someone I would describe as a person of colour.
Collectively, we need to ask the question: why do we have so many black players but so little black representation elsewhere in football? Amplifying people like Fleur will help raise awareness and educate people about the contributions of black people to football.
Eccleshare: Yeah, which in turn would change how black players are viewed — especially in relation to the point about intelligence Carl was making.
Nouble: Representation is definitely key. If people saw more managers that were black, they could probably accept certain reactions, certain languages that are used, certain behaviours, certain postures — just different things they wouldn’t see in their normal everyday life.
Anka: Frank, what do you think makes a football fan think they can boo one of their own players?
Nouble: Honestly, I don’t know. It’s very difficult when a team-mate is getting booed. It’s almost like you don’t want to take sides but you want to encourage them because you don’t want to damage their confidence even more. Even if you might actually be thinking: ‘Fucking hell, he needs to liven up’.
Anka: It sounds like what you’re describing is isolating. It’s isolating to be booed regardless of who’s booing you. And then it takes on another layer when it’s your own fanbase.
Nouble: That’s too much. I can never understand that.
Eccleshare: Have you ever had that, Frank?
Nouble: Never. I’ve had my team being booed, but not the booing individually like Sanchez or Emmanuel Eboue (by Woolwich fans in a home game against Wigan in 2008). I remember when that was happening. They were battering him so much that he was embarrassed to touch the ball. It was very difficult to watch.
Anka: The question is: what was it about Sanchez that made him the particular target? And then: is his skin colour a factor?
Nouble: I think more yes than no. Why is it just black players getting booed at Spurs? Like (Emerson) Royal. You had (Matt) Doherty, who is an ex-team-mate of mine at Wolves. He didn’t have a great time at Tottenham and they play in similar positions, but he was never booed the way Royal was. Again, why is there such a big difference in the reaction to a player when they play at a similar level? Why was one looked upon as maybe he’s nicking a living here? He’s taking our money. Whereas the other one is, ‘Well, he had a good career, maybe we’re just not seeing the best of him’.
Many white players have been poor for Spurs in the past couple of years, but they will not get the same treatment. Eric Dier has had spells when he’s not been great. Erik Lamela, I’m sure he wasn’t a hit, but somehow he’s still a cult hero in some people’s eyes.
Eccleshare: While players like Serge Aurier and Moussa Sissoko were seen as figures of fun for much of the time they were at the club.
What do you want people to take away from this whole episode?
Anka: I’m not saying if you boo Sanchez that you’re racist. I’m saying if you boo Sanchez, I want you to stop and think about why you did that. And ask: ‘Did Sanchez’s skin colour play a part?’.
Fundamentally, do you afford black football players the same patience as white ones? Leon talked about this; that patience is the word. Would you afford them the same grace?
I think we should have a very honest conversation about how skin colour plays a part in this kind of situation. It’s not the only reason, but it definitely is one of the ingredients, one of the things in this imperfect storm.
Being black isn’t the reason Sanchez got booed by Spurs fans, but I think his skin colour, for numerous reasons, made a certain type of Tottenham fan more comfortable when booing him.
I’m happy for him, he came in and at least made the team stable. Can’t have been easy but he showed he is tough.
He looked like Maldini compared to Romero.
He looked like Maldini compared to Romero.
Skipp was doing his best to get himself sent off, that's playing of a sort I guess.
Oh fuck off. Seriously
Dier got so much abuse he stormed the fan barricades.
Showed good character after the booing but realistically not good enough alongside almost all of our defenders. Personally don't like booing unless it's because of a lack of effort. Dier Sanchez etc try they're just not good enough, booing someone for not being good enough is useless
He showed why he didn't deserve the treatment he got last weekend.
Is he good enough? Of course not, but he's professional enough to give his level best when a lesser character wouldn't have.
We'll sell him in the summer and happier days await him elsewhere.