ALEX WILLIAMS

Now we've talked a little bit about the abuse that you faced Obviously, Britain at the time was a very different Britain to what it is now.

Some would say still a lot of work to be done as there is now.

But for you, how frequent were the incidents? Because you note down some very severe things in the book.

The incident at Everton, Millwall, Leeds, those sorts of places.

How often were you facing this sort of abuse?

Um...

It wasn't every single game.

You know, there was always the odd thing said at probably every ground.

But, you know, you've mentioned some clubs there which they were difficult to go to, especially some of the London clubs.

For whatever reason, Leeds was always a difficult place to go to.

But I always found the racism thing, rightly or wrongly, there were two sides of it.

There was the real deep racism.

hatred type of racism and then there was the mickey taking kind you know and i remember playing at leeds and just before the game started they threw a lot of proper bananas on on the pitch and yet at the other end all our city away fans had the inflatable bananas So it was quite ironic that I'm thinking to myself, we've got the inflatable ones down there.

So, you know, you just had to get

on with it.

And I think I've since found

since doing the book, the inflatable bananas were based from Imre Verradi.

I don't know the full story, but it was something to do with Imre Verradi, why we ended up having the inflatable bananas.

I mean the incident at Everton with a fan created an effigy of a burning cross you expect to kind of get support from your teammates as well?

Yeah as I said earlier I think the biggest change today is the attitude of our own players you know even going back way back when at City you know there'd be an odd joke said within our own City players and rightly or wrongly was just touted as the norm which wrongly it is today and it wouldn't happen today due to safeguarding rules regulations uh premier league just brought out a new kind mark uh around equality and diversity which um i believe we've just applied for as a club so i don't think it would happen today and i think that's the biggest change i think the other change is there's lots of black and ethnic players playing within most teams now so in some ways as a home fan how can you ridicule an away player for their ethnicity when you've got the same players potentially playing in your own team so i think that's helped to nullify a little bit of it but i do think this country is one of the better ones at combating racism you know You look at some of the Eastern European countries and things are still very, very bad.

I was going to say, when you see things like incidents in the Champions League and the Europa League and the punishments that are handed out, it's not enough, is it?

No, it's farcical.

And that's probably why it still continues today.

They need to do something really drastic about it.

And until they do that, it's going to be difficult to go away.