Tottenham defender Danny Rose has opened up on the racism that he has been subjected to and has admitted that he cannot wait to see the back of football but why should we care what a Spurs player feels? Because we must show solidarity in the face of racism in our beloved game.
Arsenal, like most clubs these days, have a significant amount of BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) players in our club right from the youth set up to our senior squad and they must be protected and the truth is they are not.
We all know what happened with Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and the banana incident in our game against Spurs, we all hear the monkey chants and vile abuse thrown at players, either at the stadium or on TV, we cannot pretend it does not happen and we cannot stand idly by and allow tribalism to be used as an excuse to ignore what is happening and that is why I have absolute sympathy for Danny Rose, Raheem Sterling and any other player subjected to this disgusting treatment regardless of what club they play for.
What if it is our own young lad Folarin Balogun that is targeted? What if it damages his confidence so much that it affects his whole career or Reiss Nelson or even Ainsley Maitland-Niles at some point in the future, what will it take for the authorities once and for all to put a stop to this crap.
We have covered this recently in two articles here and here and I make no apology for posting another article about this and neither do I apologise that the central person in this article is a Tottenham player, in fact, I am glad it is the treatment of Danny Rose I am writing about because it tells you that eradicating racism in the game is far bigger than any club loyalty.
Tottenham gives us so much ammunition to take the piss out of them that I can find space to condemn racism against one of their players, because I know that tomorrow or the next day or next month or next year it will be an Arsenal player being victimised and that breaks my heart.