Perhaps it’s me or perhaps I just come from a generation where respect and good manners were thought of as positive qualities. But the behaviour of football fans today - and I’m talking generally, not specifically about individuals - has sunk to a new low.

It’s evident everywhere you look or go - from the terraces of Premier League grounds to the yobbish comments some idiots leave under Sportingo articles. The message is consistent - if you support our team you’re OK; if you support anyone else, you’re scum and we’ll do everything to offend you in the most insulting way we can think of. As for opposition players and officials, we’re paying your wages and it’s our privilege to abuse you racially, personally or indeed in any way we want.

Aston Villa fans were quick to defend themselves after they turned viciously on Harry Redknapp recently, claiming the Portsmouth boss ‘'asked for it'’ after making a gesture at them. From what I can gather, Harry merely responded to taunts about his arrest in a fraud investigation a few days earlier by sticking up three fingers to indicate how many goals his team had thumped into the Villa net that afternoon.

'The message is consistent - if you support our team you’re OK; if you support anyone else, you’re scum and we’ll do everything to offend you in the most insulting way we can think of'


Harry’s mistake was that he responded at all - and I strongly advise all players and officials not to rise to the baiting of morons, no matter how obscene the taunts.

This week, a Manchester City fan was cleared of a racially-aggravated public order offence after allegedly taunting Spurs fans with anti-semitic insults about the Holocaust - including hissing noises to imitate gas - and also imitating a crashing aeroplane, Munich style, to goad rival Manchester United supporters. The defence seemed to be not so much that he didn’t do it - but that just about everyone engages in this sort of abuse at modern-day football matches.

So are we to accept it as acceptable behaviour, then, when Chelsea fans taunt rival Liverpool supporters about the Hillsborough disaster during their Carling Cup clash at Stamford Bridge?

And are we to presume it's perfectly normal for rival fans to goad Norwich boss Glenn Roeder - who has thankfully recovered from a brain tumour disgnosed in 2003 - with taunts of ''Tumour boy, why are you still alive?'' I'm sorry, but people who do that are the lowest of the low.

Roeder sums the morons up so accurately when he says: ''"They're saddos, real saddos, low-lifes. Animals don't behave like that. But what I've convinced myself, and what I know is right, is that it's good I'm still here to hear it."

Can ANYONE justify revolting racism and disrespect for the dead and those lucky to be alive? What a sleight on society that public behaviour has sunk to such a low. I know I’ll be branded ‘grandad’ and ‘old fuddy duddy’ for saying it, but modern-day football can learn so much from the way the game was both played and watched in my youth.

It’s nearly half a century since I went to my first Cardiff City game and I can honestly say I saw only ONE unsavoury incident of any kind at Ninian Park in those days. That involved a solo visiting Everton fan who said something out of place on the Bob Bank - and the aggro was quelled in a moment by self-policing vigilantes in the crowd.

Today, the mere idea of opposition fans mingling with home supporters in the stands is enough to conjure up visions of World War Three. And to my shame, my beloved Bluebirds seem to have some of the unruliest yobs of all among their yanks.

I’m not naïve enough to believe the old moral standards will ever return, any more than the government will bring back the corporal punishment and clips around the ear which taught us schoolboys to have respect for authority.

These days, disrespect is rife in society. Most young people wouldn’t dream of giving up their seat on the bus to an elderly passenger, for example. Is it that parents of the last generation stopped teaching their children common etiquette? Or is it because the wimpishmess of successive government has led to the punishment no longer fitting the crime - and the victims now being the guilty ones?