Songs of the terraces.

The young boy sat in Anfield trembles slightly in anticipation for the game he is about to see. His youthful exuberance spills over as he squeals out the first few bars of You'll Never Walk Alone. The sound is rippled and magnified around the ground as the Kop stands to join him in song, and for those few split seconds he is the terrace hero.

Football is a game; it's the crowd that make football games into an event. A bubbling cess-pit of raw emotion triggered by the shriek of the referees whistle. Old men, young men, women and children, from all walks of life, bound together by their shared patronage; every Saturday at 3pm, their voices sing as one. It is these songs that shape the identity of the football fan as we know them.

Spontaneous, uncensored, primal, the terraces are the colloseum of the modern age. Each set of supporters has a set repertoire of songs, some unique to their team (forever blowing bubbles, West Ham), and some that are generic across football (....the greatest team the world has ever seen), but there is no set order in which these songs appear. A lone voice belts out the first few bars, sometimes the sound snowballs until the terraces are conjoined in song, sometimes the advances are spurned and the song dies away. Nothing is for certain, nothing is expected.

The songs speak of rivalries, of allegiances, of loves, of loathes. High flying business men in suits joined in song by the working class builder, football truly is the greatest leveller.

There is a murky underbelly that underpins the terrace chants, however. When emotion gets to much, when the platform is abused for an altogether abhorant purpose. Due to the clout wielded by thousands of people all singing the same tune,it also creates a breeding ground for tunes with racist or similarly henous stigma attatched to them. While this is a minor problem in England, in Italy it is a pandemic.
One of the plethora of new recruits arriving at Manchester City's Eastlands training complex over the summer Mario Ballotelli, suffered more than most at the hands of the Italian Crowd during his time at Inter Milan. Ballotelli, who is of Ghanain heritage played his matches to a backdrop of racial slurs and abuse, for in Italy the ideas of Racism are ingrained. There has never been a black player to dub the Famous royal blue of the Azzuri national team. The prodigiously gifted Ballotelli would be the first. The crowd are reacting to a situation they are utterly ignorant to in a manner that should be chastised, but until such a time that the first black Italian pulls on the national team shirt this will never change.

No matter the ways in which terrace chants can be abused, without them football would just not be football. They form a leveller, a unifier, a means of (acceptable) expression. They encourage creativity. Allow fans of all ages a sense of comradery, of brotherhood. And every now and then they give a small boy sat inside Anfield his moment of fame.