Ready, Willing and Disabled By Phil Matthews
Friday September 15 deserves to go down in the annals of football history as a very important day indeed. It was on that day that the National Audit of Football Stadia was launched at Highbury.
The audit is to be carried out by the National Association of Disabled Supporters backed by money provided by the mobile phone network One 2 One. Disabled supporters will visit every ground from the Premiership to the Conference and check for a whole raft of facilities to conduct the audit.
The chances are that if you are considered disabled you will know precisely what sort of problems disabled supporters face at football grounds.
It has been estimated that up to one in four people suffer some sort of disability. It may be partial deafness, or dyslexia, or even paraplegia. Human nature being what it is individuals play down their particular disabilities in a wish to be integrated as fully as possible with the rest of society. They want to be able to earn a living, or just go along with their mates to cheer on their favourite football team.
On Stockport County's disabled supporters club website they have no doubt of the value of sport to disabled spectators: "Sport, whether participating or as a spectator is brilliant for stress relief and we hope to help those who are in isolation.
Disability is difficult to define as it covers so many different types and degrees of problems. It causes football clubs problems, as they cannot treat every disabled fan who comes to the ground the same because each person's needs are different.
Football likes to compartmentalize spectators. Home and visiting fans are segregated and the rich are cosseted in executive boxes while the others are left to freeze on the terraces or in the stands.
You cannot, however, treat a blind man the same as a paraplegic - the problems caused by their disabilities are not the same.
The wheelchair supporter, as like as not, can see perfectly well but would never be able to get his chair through the turnstile and almost certainly need the use of a disabled toilet rather than an ordinary one. The blind man may be fully mobile but can only get a full grasp of the match in progress via an audio commentary piped to his seat.
There is no national standard to determine precisely what constitutes a disability. Football clubs are, therefore, left to set their own standards and come to different conclusions.
To give you a couple of examples of what I mean let us take the two moat widely perceived type of disabled supporter - the blind fan, and the one in a wheelchair.
Take the blind fan first. Some grounds provide commentary via headphones to the blind and partially sighted. They have to register their interest before match day and can then obtain a seat in the appropriate area. Some smaller clubs do not have access to the technology required but seat blind fans in the commentary box where they can listen to broadcasts at source. I even know of one club that only boasted of two blind supporters and asked the local hospital radio commentator to sit with the couple and provide non-stop audio description between broadcasting reports.
As I was that commentator I can confirm that any possible joy that the pair got from my commentary was more than outweighed by the annoyance felt by all the crowd surrounding us who definitely did not need to hear someone babbling on incessantly about action that they could se for themselves.
With regards to the wheelchair supporter most clubs are prepared to allow wheelchair users in. I hesitate to use the words 'welcome them', as there is nothing very welcoming about sitting on the running track without any overhead cover on a cold November afternoon.
To be fair to the clubs, some of whose grounds were built a century or more ago, it is expensive and difficult to upgrade them and their owners can only provide wheelchair facilities in areas of the ground that safety regulations allow. In the second part of this feature we shall explore some of the initiatives taken to cater for disabled supporters and how clubs are learning to cooperate with disabled fans.