18 May 2006

FOOTBALL CHANTS

Bad luck to the Arse and all that, but what struck me last night was the revival of an old song:
One-nil to the Arsenal
One-nil to the Arsenal
One-nil to the Arsenal
and so on ad nauseam or a brilliant goal. I remember a few old songs myself as an Ipswich supporter (and "One-nil to the Ipswich Town" went down pretty well at the 1978 cup final) but most of them are shockingly racist or make libellous claims about rival players or teams:
John Bond, John Bond shags his son
John Bond shags his son
sung by the North Stand when Bond was managing Norwich and his son Kevin was playing for them, and then:
Jigger, jigger, jigger
Kill that nigger!
which was probably from the same game; it was certainly directed at Justin Fashanu, then the Norwich number nine and in the frame to take over as England's centre-forward from our own Paul Mariner. Fashanu subsequently bombed as a player and committed suicide after being outed as gay.

Then there was:
What's it like
What's it like
What's it like to have no jobs?
directed at Liverpool every time we met them in the early 1980s.

I always loved:
We can't read
We can't write
That don't really matter

We come down form Ipswich town
Riding on our tractors

Oooh-aaargh, oooh-aaargh, oooh-aaargh, oooh-aaargh
Oooh-aaargh, Oooh-aaargh

Oooh-aaargh, oooh-aaargh, oooh-aaargh, oooh-aaargh
Oooh-aaargh, Oooh-aaargh
but that was a bit of a one-off self-parody. Does anyone have any footie chants that go beyond the obvious, the reactionary or the self-deprecatory?

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