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Good Morning, On Saturday, I was at Loftus Road watching Queens Park Rangers play Tottenham. The fact it was a London derby and that QPR badly needed a result gave the game added spice. The chanting of the home fans started humorously enough. They declared their foot-balling supremacy in both West London and the World; the superiority of their striker, Charlie Austin; their low regard for all things Chelsea. They even generously offered to sing a song for the visiting fans in the absence of any audible support. It was vigorous and funny. Then Tottenham scored and the object of the chanting moved from ribbing the opposition fans to questioning the visual capacity and impartiality of the referee. All standard fan-banter, but when Tottenham scored again wit was totally abandoned in favour of hurling rank abuse at the match officials and the players. The ugly mood reached a nadir when a fan next to me screamed anti-Semitic abuse at a Tottenham player – a club with strong Jewish associations. Impressively, this last insult drew an immediate reaction from someone behind us who told him to sit down and leave it out. Which, mercifully, he did. All around the ground hoardings displayed the logos of the Kick It Out campaign, an organisation committed to getting rid of all forms of discrimination in football, and no doubt they’d have been heartened by this example of an individual standing up to racial abuse. Although why stop there? What about the abuse that sees a linesman being called unrepeatable things for twenty minutes by a man leading a choir of a thousand people? Some will say that’s part of the game. I’m sure most fans who dish out the verbals know where to draw the line. But for much of this match I wasn’t quite sure where that line was. A crowd is an intoxicating thing. I admit to the giddy pleasure of being swept up in the passion and partisanship, the tribal sense of belonging. But there’s anonymity and safety in crowds that can encourage people to hide, to sublimate their own morality to the will of the group. We then become stupefied by the power of others and by our own powerlessness in the face of it. ‘Do not follow the crowd into doing wrong,’ scripture warns. The Psalmist even asks to be hidden from the noisy crowd that ‘sharpen their tongues like swords and aim their words like arrows, shoot at the innocent man,’ whilst encouraging each other in the knowledge that in a crowd no one will know it’s them. I went to watch a game of football but ended up experiencing a strange mix of entertainment, abuse and faint menace, as well as having to face my own moral cowardice. Thankfully someone was courageous enough to do what I couldn’t and take a stand. As football fans themselves prove, it only takes one person to change the chant of the whole crowd. First broadcast 10 March 2015