No one likes us, we do care

We’re milling about on the royal blue MFC-monogrammed carpet in one of the well-appointed rooms at the pristine New Den.

And we’re asking polite football questions and eating the sandwiches and drinking the coffee the very nice catering women have prepared with their usual diligence.

The atmosphere could hardly be more welcoming. It’s the FA Cup. This is part of the ritual. We’re here to talk about the ancient mug that makes us feel good between scandals (pick your favourite from rape allegations, death threats, drugs, drinking, racism).

And Millwall, rotten old Millwall, are in the quarterfinals of the most famous competition in the game for the first time in 19 years.

But we’re also here because this, according to cliché, is the baddest club in town, the Mike Tyson of football. We’re here because they’re at it again, with their thuggish, racist behaviour. Or so says Alastair Campbell.

And Theo Paphitis has had enough of it. The chairperson (who made his millions in stationery and lingerie) wants to talk about how this will be the greatest day of his life, how the fans deserve better, how Dennis Wise has transformed the team and how, well, maybe he himself will be here for a while yet and maybe he won’t.

‘Oh blimey,” Paphitis says when asked if he had resolved his differences with Campbell. The Burnley superfan claims he heard Millwall fans monkey-chanting Mohammed Camara in their league game here last month. He was supported by Burnley manager, Stan Ternent.

Paphitis says it’s rubbish.

But it fits the picture. And Wise could hardly have reinforced the stereotype of a rough-and-tumble club more definitively than to be sent off in his first game as player-manager. For the 13th time in his career. Telling others to behave is difficult with such a CV — even if your wife is a solicitor.

Not long ago, there was the training ground dust-up between the 16-year-old Moses Ashikodi and the older and much bigger striker Mark McCammon, with allegations of a knife being used to back up threats. Other clubs are similarly robust. But Millwall have the reputation.

A lot of people will tell you Paphitis is the best thing to happen to Millwall in years, a passionate, eloquent chairman who cares as much about the club as the majority of decent fans who are, from time to time, embarrassed by the remnants of a dirty past.

The past is often not a nice place to go to in football, where the eternal mantra is ‘Let’s move on”.

Paphitis’s response is typical: ‘I don’t really want to harp on about the past. The Campbell thing is just dead news. But there are positives in any business, and in life. This is a great season for us. We’re in the running for the play-offs, we’re in the quarterfinals of the FA Cup. As a chairman, I can’t really ask for much more than that.”

But history’s echo won’t die just like that. Few clubs have as unfortunate a record at this stage of the FA Cup as do Millwall. In 1978 they misbehaved against Ipswich, losing 6-1 and prompting Town’s then manager, Bobby Robson, to comment: ‘Set the flame-throwers on them.”

Eight seasons later, some of them went on the rampage at Luton and tried to run the other end. The enduring image of that game is the televised battle on the pitch between Millwall hooligans and police on horseback.

That was then. A lot happened after that. Millwall became the first club to have a crèche, believe it or not. They began to reach out to the community, an audience that only 30 years ago was almost exclusively white, male and working-class and is now as diverse and multi-cultural as that of any urban environment.

Nevertheless it is hardly an outlandish claim to make that a few of the neanderthals survive. If you don’t want to hear them, you won’t. If you’re a steward and you don’t want aggravation, you will ignore them. If you’re a policeman who’s drawn the short straw on Saturday afternoon, you might judge that it’s safer to let the chanting go rather than incite the mob. They are like guests who won’t leave.

So it is easy to sympathise with Paphitis.

‘It’s a really nice ground. Just look around you. And see how much graffiti there is. See how much damage there is. Ten years. No graffiti, no damage. This is a 10-year-old stadium and we haven’t got bags of money to refurbish it every year the way other people have. It’s had to last and it’s been very well respected by the fans.

‘We are founding members of Kick Out Racism, leading lights. Since I’ve been here, six years, we’ve very much tried to reach our community, which is a mixed-race community. This is what we are. Forget the past. Which is why we’ve spent so much money recently building a walkway, from the stand behind you through to the station.

”It cost an absolute fortune, but it means away fans don’t have to go back through the streets. This is not one of those grounds on the edge of a town. We’re packed right in the middle of housing and we need to respect that. It just makes life a lot easier.”

So, what do the locals think? Yvonne Mayne is a season ticketholder who takes her son and daughter to everywhere but Wigan, the only ground where she has experienced trouble.

‘I’ve been supporting Millwall since I was knee-high to a grasshopper,’ she says. Mayne was happy, though, when Millwall left the old ground.

‘I mean the old Den, I’m not slagging it off, there was lots of passion there, but it was a bit of a dump. You lost the terraces didn’t you, so I mean you lost the atmosphere of the terraces. People knock Millwall supporters but they’re just a wonderful crowd. There’s lots of passion there and all these so-called mindless hooligans, I mean, they’re everywhere, but I’ve never actually come across any of them here.’

Yildiray Coskun, has owned Times Kebab, half a mile from the ground, for 10 years.

‘All the supporters come in,” he says. ‘They also drink across the road at the pub and they are all very friendly. I have never encountered any racist abuse or problems.

‘My next-door neighbour is a Millwall supporter, who is white, and he, like a customer of mine who is covered in tattoos, is always offering to get tickets for me to go to the games.”

Peter Cripps is the landlord of The Black Horse near the ground and has been going to Millwall since he was six. He was at the Burnley game and, like Mayne, says he heard no racist chanting, just booing of Camara because of an incident in an earlier game.

It wasn’t always so innocent, he concedes.

‘In the 1960s and 1970s Millwall were a problem. They had a big hooligan following and they probably were the worst in the league. But, me being one of them myself, I would go to every game, home and away. I saw a lot of things in those days.

‘But when we moved to the new ground, to be honest the area changed, the population in the area changed. People weren’t the original sort of people from the area. If you look at the population in the area now they are sort of Nigerian, West Indian or Vietnamese.”

Old hooligans do fade away, though.

‘The Millwall contingent now,” says Cripps, ‘or descendants of those hooligans, shall we say, would be living out in Kent. The hooligan element of Millwall now is nowhere near what it was.”

These are on-the-ground views, uncomplicated and as close to reality as you will get. Politicians, especially two who are running for mayor of London, like to keep tabs on their opinions.

‘I have been watching Millwall since I came to London in my twenties,” says the Liberal Democrat Simon Hughes, ‘and the club has changed for three reasons.”

He identifies the move to the new ground, the changing demographic and, unusually for a politician, the actual football.

‘We now realise we’re a club capable of getting to the top of the league and going anywhere — we haven’t quite made it as yet – but we’re challenging for the play-offs again, we got into the final of the Auto Windscreens Shield a few years ago and we’re in the last eight of the FA Cup. So the ambition has changed.”

Boxing promtoer Frank Maloney, also a mayoral candidate, has followed the club for 42 of his 45 years, he says.

‘It was always quite funny and quite tough,” Maloney says. ‘They were always very intimidating to the opposition. I remember when Millwall got up to the old first division and Everton were playing there. A policeman went into the Everton dressing room and said, ‘Now look chaps, if you get injured down the sideline, I advise you get yourself back on the pitch, because we can’t guarantee your safety.’

He said the whole Everton team were just deflated.

‘They’ve done a great job in the community, they’re much more of a community club. It’s not as intimidating as the old ground was. And now all the dockers have been replaced by, say, South Londoners who’ve done well in life.”

Good results and affluence: who’d have thought they would be the saviour of Millwall? —