Many football hooligans have switched from the grounds to the internet
Anonymous cyber bullies are seeking to trash the reputations of players, managers and others in the sport
The Aston Villa manager Martin O'Neill whose future became the centre of of a whirlwind of internet rumours.
As a small child I lived in Lebanon for a while. At my strict Beirut school, talking, uninvited, during lessons invariably led to a strip of Sellotape being stuck across your mouth.
Punishments can rarely have been more effective; quite apart from instantly silencing miscreants, the pain of the tape's eventual removal – it hurts – proved a disincentive to reoffending.
The deployment of such a brutally old-fashioned classroom calming device would cost teachers their careers today but you sometimes wonder if the general concept might not be ripe for adaptation elsewhere.
If only certain football fans' fingers could be tightly gaffer-taped together whenever the urge to begin blogging or tweeting about their latest bête noire overtook them, the world might become a nicer – and saner – place.
While the internet remains a wonderful invention, football supporters and the web are an increasingly noxious mix. With stewards and police no longer turning persistently deaf ears to racist or homophobic abuse inside grounds, a warped, and militantly vociferous, minority have moved from shouting venom to typing toxic thoughts before pressing Send.
Others, meanwhile, simply prefer making hi-tech mischief. There have been two notable recent examples of such trends. At Newcastle United the alleged altercation between Andy Carroll and Steven Taylor, which left Taylor nursing a doubly broken jaw and feeding through a straw, prompted a surfeit of septic, completely unfounded, rumours on some Newcastle supporters' sites.
If Newcastle's enduring, ill-advised, silence on the Taylor-Carroll affair is a pollutant at the heart of an otherwise renascent club, Aston Villa were dumbfounded last week when fans' forums began buzzing with chatter concerning Martin O'Neill's supposedly imminent departure in the wake of Villa's 7-1 thrashing by Chelsea.
All it took was a post beginning: "I don't know if this is true but ..." on VillaTalk for the rumour to develop "legs" long enough to ensure its replication on national radio stations and newspaper websites.
When the furore subsided and the manager was discovered to be still wearing a Villa tracksuit, O'Neill asked a pertinent question. "Really, is this how the media works?"
His subsequent self-proclaimed ignorance about the blogosphere's existence and a laptop's basic functions may appear disingenuous but it is not entirely implausible that O'Neill has better things to do than fritter time online.
Other managers are simply too obsessed with downloading their beloved Prozone stats first-hand to remain computer illiterate. Once logged on, few can resist a little surfing and often find monitoring fan opinion becomes an uncomfortably compulsive reading habit.
Frequently, it is also a recipe for understandable depression. There is an unfairness inherent in seeing people ridiculed and their reputations trashed by anonymous, factually challenged, half-wits who would probably never dare say "boo" to the object of their vitriol's face. Even worse, the suspicion is that witch-hunts are sometimes manufactured by the same numbskull submitting multiple comments via different usernames.
Constructive criticism is healthily democratic but a cross-section of football fan sites contain far too many posts which seem not merely worryingly childish but cruel and, often, cringe-inducingly crude.
With contributors shielding their true identities by hiding behind silly names such as BeansOnToast or BigCheese and many forums unmoderated or slackly policed, they are also cowardly. A modern equivalent of poison pen letters. How many bloggers would be happy for their wives or employers to know precisely what they have been writing?
The time has come for the game's ruling bodies to initiate a national "Online Respect" campaign designed to modify an uncomfortably harsh climate of web ranting.
Richard Bevan, the impressive chief executive of the League Managers Association, could be the right man to coordinate a project which might involve David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and Fabio Capello reminding everyone that cyber bullying is sad. Steven Taylor may even be persuaded to explain what being a victim feels like.
Naive idealism? Well, things change. When I lived in Beirut, Lebanon was on the brink of civil war. Today it's peaceful, welcoming and most travel writers' "hot" new destination for 2010.
Anonymous cyber bullies are seeking to trash the reputations of players, managers and others in the sport
The Aston Villa manager Martin O'Neill whose future became the centre of of a whirlwind of internet rumours.
As a small child I lived in Lebanon for a while. At my strict Beirut school, talking, uninvited, during lessons invariably led to a strip of Sellotape being stuck across your mouth.
Punishments can rarely have been more effective; quite apart from instantly silencing miscreants, the pain of the tape's eventual removal – it hurts – proved a disincentive to reoffending.
The deployment of such a brutally old-fashioned classroom calming device would cost teachers their careers today but you sometimes wonder if the general concept might not be ripe for adaptation elsewhere.
If only certain football fans' fingers could be tightly gaffer-taped together whenever the urge to begin blogging or tweeting about their latest bête noire overtook them, the world might become a nicer – and saner – place.
While the internet remains a wonderful invention, football supporters and the web are an increasingly noxious mix. With stewards and police no longer turning persistently deaf ears to racist or homophobic abuse inside grounds, a warped, and militantly vociferous, minority have moved from shouting venom to typing toxic thoughts before pressing Send.
Others, meanwhile, simply prefer making hi-tech mischief. There have been two notable recent examples of such trends. At Newcastle United the alleged altercation between Andy Carroll and Steven Taylor, which left Taylor nursing a doubly broken jaw and feeding through a straw, prompted a surfeit of septic, completely unfounded, rumours on some Newcastle supporters' sites.
If Newcastle's enduring, ill-advised, silence on the Taylor-Carroll affair is a pollutant at the heart of an otherwise renascent club, Aston Villa were dumbfounded last week when fans' forums began buzzing with chatter concerning Martin O'Neill's supposedly imminent departure in the wake of Villa's 7-1 thrashing by Chelsea.
All it took was a post beginning: "I don't know if this is true but ..." on VillaTalk for the rumour to develop "legs" long enough to ensure its replication on national radio stations and newspaper websites.
When the furore subsided and the manager was discovered to be still wearing a Villa tracksuit, O'Neill asked a pertinent question. "Really, is this how the media works?"
His subsequent self-proclaimed ignorance about the blogosphere's existence and a laptop's basic functions may appear disingenuous but it is not entirely implausible that O'Neill has better things to do than fritter time online.
Other managers are simply too obsessed with downloading their beloved Prozone stats first-hand to remain computer illiterate. Once logged on, few can resist a little surfing and often find monitoring fan opinion becomes an uncomfortably compulsive reading habit.
Frequently, it is also a recipe for understandable depression. There is an unfairness inherent in seeing people ridiculed and their reputations trashed by anonymous, factually challenged, half-wits who would probably never dare say "boo" to the object of their vitriol's face. Even worse, the suspicion is that witch-hunts are sometimes manufactured by the same numbskull submitting multiple comments via different usernames.
Constructive criticism is healthily democratic but a cross-section of football fan sites contain far too many posts which seem not merely worryingly childish but cruel and, often, cringe-inducingly crude.
With contributors shielding their true identities by hiding behind silly names such as BeansOnToast or BigCheese and many forums unmoderated or slackly policed, they are also cowardly. A modern equivalent of poison pen letters. How many bloggers would be happy for their wives or employers to know precisely what they have been writing?
The time has come for the game's ruling bodies to initiate a national "Online Respect" campaign designed to modify an uncomfortably harsh climate of web ranting.
Richard Bevan, the impressive chief executive of the League Managers Association, could be the right man to coordinate a project which might involve David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and Fabio Capello reminding everyone that cyber bullying is sad. Steven Taylor may even be persuaded to explain what being a victim feels like.
Naive idealism? Well, things change. When I lived in Beirut, Lebanon was on the brink of civil war. Today it's peaceful, welcoming and most travel writers' "hot" new destination for 2010.