Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I am so relieved England lost their men's football World Cup semi-final.

It's not like how I'm glad when I tease my friends about England men doing badly at cricket (I manage to be from a country that doesn't even really play cricket and I still fail the Tebbit Test). It's a totally different thing. I was really dreading an England win tonight, because them getting into the World Cup final, win or lose, would be bad on every level.

Because English football breeds violence and jingoism and there's already far too much of those. There's already too much exceptionalism in how England (Britain, but mostly England) thinks about itself. Brexit couldn't have happened without it.

Still I do think of those domestic violence stats I've seen all over social media; maybe you have too. A 38% rise when England lose. But 26% when they win. I'm sorry for the people who had a horrible night. I hope they don't have to dread the men's football World Cup final so much now.

Every friend of mine who shared that poster or made any similar post on Facebook had one guy in the comments complaining about it. One even said it was racist against the English, despite many people pointing out that a campaign made in England pointing out English statistics to an English audience is going to focus on England (and of course it's not possible to be racist against England but I didn't even go into that; this is telling for how white people think about racism though, we generally treat it like it's just a mean word to call somebody).

Most complainers didn't go as far as bleating they were victims of racism but they were all "not all football fans"ing. So eventually I got fed up and wrote this in one of the sets of Facebook comments (modified a little now to add stuff I wanted to mention but forgot):

I think the defensiveness of football fans needs addressing too. The fragility.

I hope the way that some react to statistics like these domestic violence ones indicate that they understand how serious and bad this is. But mostly they're just quick to distance themselves from it.

And I think they do that because they fail to appreciate that their experience as fans is very different from that of non-fans."I've been going to games for umpteen years," great, but that means you don't know what happens to people just trying to exist in a city centre, walk anywhere or cycle or use public transport, while football is going on. That means you're not a target in the way we are.

That means you probably don't know my friends and I have to warn each other about derby days, World Cup games and other big matches, so we know to avoid going into town. When I worked at a hospital, the results of Manchester derby games had to be part of the handover because they had such an impact on people's mental state, and how much fighting we could expect.

None of that happens for rugby or cricket matches or even women's football, just men's football.

Football fans are an in-group who doesn't believe how different the out-group's experience is, and I wish there was some way to get that across to them.

I'm just not interested in listening to football fans about this. I think they should listen to my friends and me. We all have stories: pushed off their bikes, punched in the guts on the way home for work for not looking sufficiently happy after some big win over Argentina, Andrew constantly having his beard grabbed and once being prevented from getting off a tram at the stop he wanted and then shoved off at the next one, I was bodyslammed into a wall while getting off a train and had such a panic attack James nearly missed his last train home to look after me.

Yes I know there's more to football than public drunkenness and violence and entitlement and bigotry but I'm sick of having to argue with people who don't understand that those things have become entangled with football in England, so I'm glad England lost.