Remember this? January 2001

Football fans can be ejected from grounds for foul and abusive language. Players can be red-carded for swearing at referees. Coaches can be expelled from their dug-outs for abusing the officials. Now even the tannoy men are being gagged. This is taken from an article by Duleep Allirajah in Spiked back in January 2001.

"The latest casualty of this mind-your-language culture is Jonathan Richards, PA announcer at second division Reading. Richards was forced to resign after he attacked Millwall manager Mark McGhee when the two teams met on 6 January 2001. McGhee had walked out on Reading in 1994 and Richards urged the home fans to give him a barracking.

Richards is not the first tannoy man to lose his job for expressing his views too strongly. In 1995 Swindon Town sacked their announcer who, outraged at the dismissal of player-manager Steve McMahon, declared 'I've seen some crap refereeing decisions in my time and that's the worst'. In 2000, Rugby League club Oldham sacked its PA announcer for calling a refereeing decision 'shocking' during a game against Workington Town.

Part of the delight in hearing a tannoy man go over the top must be the sheer incongruity of it all. Most PA announcers are graduates of hospital radio, and their idea of getting a crowd going is to play dismal records like Queen's 'We will rock you'. The Crystal Palace PA announcer, with whose oeuvre I'm most familiar, has cultivated a cheesy Alan Freeman drawl which makes his attempts at rabble-rousing even more cringeworthy. Lately, for some inexplicable reason, he has also taken to playing the house anthem 'Zombie Nation' (there must be something in the pies). Needless to say the crowd is usually unmoved.

I have never experienced a tannoy maverick at work, but I am sure it would be a precious moment, akin to those legendary incidents when club mascots - usually people dressed as big animals - fight each other.

The sacking of a tannoy man is wrong, and I'm not just talking free speech here. What is under threat is that essential ingredient of any good sporting contest - needle. Jonathan Richards' crime was simply that he tried to inject a bit of needle into the game. And let's face it, where would football be without some needle to spice things up from time to time?

I have seen many a dull encounter transformed as soon as a bit of bad blood is introduced. A heavy tackle here; a bit of 'afters' there; players squaring up ('handbags at ten paces' as they say in the trade); the referee struggling to restore order. Top class entertainment! Suddenly the crowd is on its feet, shouting and screaming.

If we can't have champagne football, what better than some argy-bargy to liven up a Saturday afternoon? If the football authorities are serious about wanting to improve the atmosphere at matches, they should consider employing shock-jock tannoy men who understand the fine art of needle."