The true voice of football is being heard

How do you square the outpourings of sympathy for Fabrice Muamba and respect for Gary Speed with the vile chants about the death of Nigel Doughty, the Nottingham Forest chairman, heard at the club’s recent match against Derby County?

It’s easy. The vast majority of football fans harbour decent human emotions. Which makes it all the more important that those who let the game and humanity down are expelled. It is Derby’s responsibility to identify and ban indefinitely those who insulted the memory of Doughty, a generous giver to better causes than football, and that of the FA to have the bans extended to every ground in the United Kingdom.

The same should apply to larger numbers of supporters who sully other emotionally intense fixtures such as Liverpool v Manchester United. Insensitivity has had its day.

The true voice of the game is being heard and I confess to pleasant surprise at the alacrity with which fans of Bolton and Tottenham united in wishing or praying for Muamba’s recovery, to the exclusion of all else, and how the feeling has spread not only to every corner of England but beyond.

In Madrid, Cristiano Ronaldo took the field wearing a message of support. In Florence, Andrea Pirlo dedicated each of Juventus’s five goals to the Bolton midfielder, saying: “We are all with him.”

Even tweets have acquired a measure of dignity, fellow footballers taking care to spell every word out. Atheists and agnostics have prayed because Muamba’s fiancee has requested it.

Just as supporters everywhere devised ways of seeking to ease the grief of Speed’s family, a community is reaching out to Muamba: helplessly, perhaps, but in a way that offers something precious. There is much about contemporary society — and far too much about football — that kills hope. The affection surrounding Muamba as he fights for his life engenders it. Not that anything will seem to matter unless he wins.