First of all, I don’t hate Charlton, not in the same way Coventry fans hate the Villa. I see Charlton more as an irrelevance really - a team and fan base we like to laugh at, mainly due to their delusions of grandeur in believing that their rightful place should be in the Premier League, and not slumming it down in the dreadful Championship!
Stoke City fans feel the same way. Go on both the Charlton and Stoke football forums and just read the level of entitlement that makes them think they‘re so superior to all the rest of us. It’s pathetic really, but also very, very funny. That’s why I can’t take either of those clubs seriously anymore.
I’m happy to address your sly racist inference dig because, unlike you, I know the real truth and not learnt a lot of the lies peddled about us by the tabloids and social media over the past five decades!
I‘ve been going to Millwall since 1974. I’m now 62, so I’ve seen it all. I don’t know how old you are, but back in the 70s and 80s football fans rivalry and hatred of other clubs was pretty much the norm and much more intense than it is these days. Every club back then had their fair share of hooligans and racists, even the likes of Leeds, Man Utd, Chelsea, etc.
What helped to tarnish my club was the 1977 Panorama documentary in which we were stitched up by the BBC in how they portrayed us! Even now, 50 years on, they haven’t changed - witness how the BBC recently edited two different Trump interviews together to make Trump look like a liar. They’ve been doing this sort of thing for decades and getting away with it!
Now, I’m not denying we never used to have an element of racist fans at our club, but if you were to look back at our fan base and our club (starting from the late 60’s when we signed our first black player, striker Frank Peterson in 1968) you will see that Millwall fans have always welcomed black players at our club.
Phil Walker and Trevor Lee both signed for us in 1975. They were the first Black players to truly establish themselves and become fan favourites, with Walker winning Player of the Year in 1978. Peterson may have broke the initial barrier, but Walker and Lee were the pioneers who integrated and excelled in the late 1970s, a period when such players were rare in the upper tiers of English football.
Since then we’ve had numerous black players playing for us, many of whom have won the fans player of the season award. Ah, I hear you say, but what about your treatment of other club’s black players? Yes, that did happen in the past, but it also happened with Leeds, Man Utd, Chelsea fans, etc. as well. Those clubs don’t have that stigma against them now, because they’re big boys in the Premier League, so all that nasty history gets forgotten and brushed under the carpet so as to avoid having the Premiership name tarnished by their past misdemeanours.
Unfortunately we still do have a minority of fans who like to dish out racist slurs towards opposition players, and whilst you cannot condone that behaviour, it has been heard less and less over the years down at the Den. We’ve had CCTV and microphones installed in all four stands for a number of years now, and the perpetrators of these crimes are instantly caught and banned for life.
My club has been trying to clean up its tarnished reputation for years now, yet for all that we do in our local community (which the club has won many awards for) it only takes one journalist with an agenda against us to put a spin on something, and all of the good work and things we have put into place, just gets forgotten and the racism tag rears it’s ugly head again. It’s typical lazy journalism and much of it nowadays is totally unwarranted.
