And their excuse? "That's football, innit? Just banter."
And when it's pointed out to them? "Haha, got under your skin, whinging fannies, hope we do it more"
There is something very nasty seemingly buried in the human psyche; something that many people feel a need to release from. And, apparently, football grounds are the accepted venue in which to do so.
Taking the piss is one thing. Taunts I can accept. If you can't stand the heat etc. But this is just collective shithousery that has its roots in a time when a Tory government decided Liverpool could be England's punching bag, to distract the rest of the country from how shit their existence was.
It's petty garbage from people desperate to have someone to look down on. I'm just glad we sent this lot packing with their tails between their legs.
Whoever told lads that they're the funniest people on earth has a lot to answer for.
And when I say 'lads' I mean a certain type of person - young, male, white, loud, overconfident, often working class (but not always). There's lots of them at football grounds and they're not smart enough to be witty so their only jokes are lewd sexual remarks or taking the piss out of other people. I know people like that and the way they speak to each other is sometimes as bad as the way they speak to people who are different from them.
And they deliver all their 'banter' with such bravado that you know they genuinely think they're hilarious, when in reality they're more Jim Davidson than Bill Hicks. It's why chants like 'feed the scousers' persist, the people singing them aren't very smart, they can't connect the dots between their chants and the political environment, they don't care that they're recycling a 40-year-old joke, they probably sing it every year and still think it's as hilarious as the first time they sang it and of course their favourite thing to do is to punch down.
And for football teams with fans who aren't imaginative enough to come up with songs about their own clubs, this type of chant is their fodder. It even extends to fans going to other grounds every week singing "this is a library" or "your support is fucking shit" - it's not offensive but it's also just such inane, tired, drivel that they continue to pedal.
And like you say, their retort when the offensive chants gets highlighted is usually "stop crying" or in our case "always the victim" which is, in part, a defense mechanism. I hope that the more it's brought to attention, the more they might actually have a think about it. It wasn't that long ago that Munich chants or throwing bananas at players was considered 'banter'.
I'm glad that Liverpool fans are mostly above that sort of thing, we've got such a lengthy songbook that the idea of singing about a team who aren't our rivals just feels a bit pathetic and small time. That said, there's still work to do on the rent boys chants which comes from the same vein of laddish humour. We're better than the rest of them so I'll be happy when that's fully wiped out.
