'We Play on the Floor'

“We play on the floor, we play on the floor, West Ham United, we play on the floor”.

London Road, Peterborough - Tuesday 27 March 2012

Following defeat today by Reading, attention will presumably return to problems on the pitch. It would make a nice change from the last few days in which the media have obsessed over what goes on in the stands.

In the days following the trouncing of Peterborough, newspapers accurately reported that one of the many songs sung by a 6,000-strong away contingent was “West Ham United / We play on the floor”. The subjective interpretation that all West Ham fans hate Sam Allardyce was also portrayed as fact.

Robbie Savage, never one to miss a bandwagon, commented: “I can't remember when last West Ham played the kind of football their fans are moaning about”. He then went on to make the assumption that people with nothing better to do than talk to him on Five Live are representative of all West Ham fans, and that we are all therefore calling for Big Sam to be sacked.

This was fairly representative of the coverage in all newspapers. Allardyce duly snapped, calling West Ham fans “deluded”.

Not every song should be taken at face value. There may be some West Ham supporters with inferiority complexes but not everyone who sings “Chim chim-in-ey, chim chim-in-ey Chim chim cher-oo” believe themselves to be a bastard. Not everyone thinks that the “same old West Ham” are always “taking the piss”. And I sincerely hope that it is only a minority of fans who would truly offer up their wife to Christian Dailly.

Was there a serious point to the “We play on the floor” ditty? Of course there was. Among that crowd – and indeed among any 6,000-sample of football fans – there was a group of neanderthals. Such fans, four of whom sit behind me in the west stand at every home match, will not rest until that northerner from the Midlands is out of our club. But there is also a larger following who are simply averse to route-one football. We should perhaps be less surprised that they waited until March before voicing their irritation, and instead relieved that such negativity has not spilled over sooner.

But – and at the risk of sounding like an unwitting contributor to Private Eye’s ‘Pseuds Corner’ – the song does work on more than one level.

The media interpretation

In short, the words “we play on the floor” were directed solely at Sam Allardyce and can be translated as: “long-ball football is not welcome here and neither are you”.

Nobody should really be surprised that a section of our fans have taken it upon themselves to bemoan a game plan that all too often consists of little more than asking an isolated Carlton Cole to fend off three defenders and see if he can get his head on the end of a long ball from George McCartney and, if successful, flick it in the general direction of his nearest teammate (usually some 30 yards away).

Deluded or not, West Ham fans were never going to sit idle to such tactics. Who didn’t raise their eyebrows when Allardyce got the West Ham post? The slightest sign of restlessness amongst the natives was exactly what the press were waiting for. The moment it happened, they pounced.

A tribal need for identity

The chants were also directed at the opposing supporters and, indeed, the wider football world. Under Sam Allardyce West Ham don’t tend to play it on the floor. But West Ham fans probably don’t expect Sam to be around for that long. The last manager lasted one year. The bloke before him two years. The one before him two years. Three years. Two years.

The fans have had ample opportunity over the decade to encourage the disposal of the manager. But they never do. The owners take care of it sooner or later. In the face of this constant flux, we cling to some kind of identity. A song with the words “We play on the floor”? Why not?

The ironic interpretation

These days we don’t play on the floor. It’s a joke. Geddit?

The literal interpretation

For whatever reason, during the second half at London Road, our players decided to stop tiring out poor Carlton and instead tire out the Posh players by kicking the ball to each other’s feet. The result? We tore them to pieces. It was a joy to watch. We really did play it on the floor. Hence, “We play on the floor”.

Even the Paolo Di Canio chants seem to have been misconstrued. On Tuesday night, Ludek Miklosko, Christian Dailly and Bobby Moore also got a mention. Hammers fans like singing about former players (see previous comment about identity).

Do some West Ham fans want Paolo as the next manager? Of course they do. But tell me of a set of fans who wouldn’t be tempted by the prospect of the return of a former player with legendary status who is currently plying his trade successfully elsewhere.

Note that nobody ever sings about “the West Ham way”. In fact, I don’t think I have ever heard a West Ham fan utter the words “the West Ham way”. So far as I know, it is a term invented by journalists to bait Big Sam. Oh, and how he takes the bait. Big Sam could sit there for hours pondering this one: “The West Ham way? West Ham? Way? I don’t know no West Ham way. Nobody here’s heard of it. Not no-one”.

If the press wanted a story on Wednesday morning, Carlton Cole gave it to them when he retweeted this: “your fucking shit you 2bob cunt drop that chip off your shoulder and start working hard#TypicalSpade".

Earlier this week, a 21-year-old student was imprisoned for two months for a racist tweet relating to Fabrice Muamba. As someone who felt that this punishment was disproportionate to the crime, I would still have expected some response to the similarly vile abuse dished out to Carlton Cole. This time the media turned a blind eye.

At London Road on Tuesday night I sat across an aisle from a couple of meatheads who dished out similar abuse to one of our most hard-working players; a player who has hit double figures for the last three seasons (not that he should need a high goal ratio to deter racists).

And yet what has been the hot topic this week? A tongue-in-cheek song that has got under Big Sam’s self-proclaimed thick skin. After another tumultuous week, now it's time for a bit of perspective.

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