John Barnes during his Liverpool heyday
As John Barnes prepares to take his Jamaica side to Millwall’s New Den to take on Nigeria, he reflects on how English fans’ attitudes to black players have changed over the last 25 years.
'If the 11 best players in the country were black, that would be my England team'
Bobby Robson, 1983
John Barnes was the most high-profile of the group of groundbreaking professionals who prompted Robson to make that resonant quote.
Today's players – and to an extent today's public – would find it unfathomable that an explanation, a defence if you like, was a necessary consequence of selecting black players to represent England.
Barnes was always dignified about what he was forced to confront on a daily basis in his job. It happened outside of public earshot as well. Inside the dressing room. On the training pitch. At the players' canteen. Anywhere.
"In training, you would get abuse from your own team-mates," he recalls with a half smile at the idiocy of what passed for banter. "They would call you racial names. 'Eh, nigger.' I would think, 'Oh, whatever.' It's incomprehensible to people, but this was a part of society."
Hypocrisy
If anything, it's the hypocrisy that rankles more than anything else with Barnes. He recalls a notorious trip to South America, where his goal, a work of art to illuminate a 2-0 victory in the Maracanã and one that Rio Ferdinand calls "the best England goal ever", was ignored by the National Front element of England's support.
They chose to acknowledge the contributions only of white players and claimed, absurdly, that the game finished 1-0.
"We were on the plane with three members of the National Front. They had a National Front flag," Barnes remembers. "It didn't upset me, but what gets my goat is that the very same reporters who now jump on the bandwagon about incidents in Macedonia or Spain didn't report it then.
"Why is it wrong now when it wasn't then? This was going on and nobody said a word."
It must have been hugely challenging to turn the other cheek, though. "Not at all," Barnes says. "It depends on the individual. I grew up in a middle-class family in Jamaica, I had no self-worth issues whatsoever.
Ignorance
"For someone to call me a nigger and call me worthless doesn't register with me. I consider them to be ignorant so why should they affect me? For kids growing up in England it was quite different because they would have been put down their whole lives.
"That's why I can't give anyone advice about what to do in that situation because you have to be true to your own character. To look yourself in the eye every morning you have to do whatever it takes, and if you have to kick some guy in the chest like Eric Cantona did, that's what you have to do."
Barnes has that impressive blend of intellect and empathy (a word he uses often) that makes him try to look at the opposite point of view to better understand it.
"History shows that black people have been second-class citizens, less than human.
"Only through education and integration will things change profoundly. And the future looks very bright because when you look at young kids now they dress the same, they sound the same, and they listen to the same music. The new British culture that is coming through supersedes colour and race."
Excerpt from The Observer, click here to read the article in full.
