Search: ' BNP'

Everton and the BNP recently clashed over the timing of a party campaign. Mark O'Brien looks at how the police deal with disruptons to the matchday routine

From the England team’s Nazi salute in 1938 to the T-shirts worn by Robbie Fowler and Steve McManaman in support of striking dockers, politics has frequently exerted an influence on football. That convergence caused quite some concern on Merseyside when the British National Party announced recently that they planned to conduct a leafleting campaign in Liverpool city centre on the afternoon of Saturday March 14, the same afternoon as Everton were scheduled to play host to Stoke City in the Premier League.Tranmere were at home to Huddersfield on the same afternoon, while Liverpool supporters would also be returning from their early game at Old Trafford, and according to Chief Superintendent Steve Watson of Liverpool North: “If they had all taken place at the same time it would have placed extraordinary pressures on demand and would have affected the ability to police those events effectively.”

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Bruce Wilkinson assesses Blackburn's attempt to gain Asian supporters

Blackburn Rovers are based in a town with a large Muslim population who traditionally have not followed the team. Over the last couple of years, the club has worked hard to attract more Asian supporters. The roll call of contributors to the club’s equality document (then Minister for Sport Richard Caborn, chair of Kick It Out Lord Herman Ouseley and former president of the Lancashire Council of Mosques Lord Adam Patel) shows the level of importance afforded to the issue.

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by Anthony Cartwright
Tindal Street Press, £9.99
Reviewed by Matthew Brown
From WSC 269 July 2009 

Buy this book

Novels about football are notoriously difficult; good ones distinctly rare. It’s been a long time since Brian Glanville’s Goalkeepers Are Different and although that was basically a tale for teenage boys, it still stands out in the football fiction landscape. More recently David Peace’s The Damned United, yet that could be filed under the dubious “faction” label.

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Blackburn Rovers have had little success in attracting non-white fans. But the recent Kick It Out anti-racism week was used to try to appeal to the town’s Asian community, as Bruce Wilkinson reports

There was a time when it was extremely rare to see any black or Asian faces around Ewood Park, but thankfully this has slowly begun to change. The club are running a strong anti-racism campaign under the banner of Not Under Our Roof and have put together a number of events to coincide with the Kick It Out week. Youngsters attending Rovers’ education department created anti-racism posters prominently displayed in the programme for the game against Reading. Pupils from local schools paraded before the match waving Kick It Out banners, while a number of high-profile players, including Tugay and Jason Roberts, supported the week of action.

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The Cross of St George may be everywhere but it’s not that long since it was mainly used by extremists – and, as Dan Turner explains, the BNP have stepped into a row at Oldham 

It takes a hell of a story these days to divert Oldham fans away from moaning about their team’s on-field woes. As the most expensively assembled squad of recent times at Boundary Park spent most of the autumn stumbling from one mediocre performance to another, the groans of dissatisfaction from the faithful grew and threatened to come to a head. But just as manager Ronnie Moore’s lump-it-and-pray tactics were leading even the most phlegmatic of Latics to question his position, along came the flag. And never has 18 square feet of material caused such a rumpus.

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