NEWS Shopper online’s Millwall columnist MATT LITTLE this week hits back at rival fans who have used social networking sites to claim Lions supporters made derogatory chants about Gary Speed during Saturday’s Den encounter with Cardiff.

IN 1993, Reg Burr said Millwall were once a “convenient coat-peg to hang all the evils of football on”, but that “those days are now far behind us”.

Oh Reg, dear, dear Reg.

What one of our most notorious ever chairmen couldn’t have known is Millwall would be needed as that coat-peg more than ever in the Sky era and so it has proved.

No matter what happens at other clubs, be it burning effigies or fighting on the pitch live on TV, they can all claim “at least we’re not as inherently bad as that Millwall lot”.

We are the scapegoat which allows the rest of football to glow in its new safe and middle class image.

So, it was inevitable with social network sites now such an everyday part of life this is where the next attack on Millwall FC and its much maligned supporters would be launched.

A Facebook page has been set up condemning Millwall fans for chanting about Gary Speed at Saturday’s match against Cardiff City.

The police have said they heard no such chanting, whereas others have suggested it may have been a handful of people nearest the Cardiff fans.

Either way, what is laughable about the Facebook page, and the accusers on Twitter, is Millwall are being demonised by a kangaroo court of people who weren’t even at the game.

And it gets better because chief among these were Liverpool, Manchester United, Leeds and Cardiff fans.

I can only assume the high number of Liverpool and United fans is purely down to the fact they are the best supported clubs in the country and so have the greatest number of social networkers.

Leeds and Cardiff fans are probably sticking the boot in because of their association with Gary Speed and historical dislike of Millwall.

Yet all four have seemingly forgotten their clubs have been, and continue to be, involved in unsavoury chanting incidents too.

Not that this is a competition, something which some are determined to turn it in to.

Nearly all clubs are guilty of it and this is the point - poor old Reg was wrong.

It seems Millwall are still the club which has to carry the cross for all the ugly things football provokes – aggressive tribalism and small mindedness in an arena where nobodies can be somebodies in front of a captive audience.

Which makes their calls for the club to be closed down and our fans to be banned from ever going to football again highly amusing.

Football needs Millwall.

Without us around to demonise, who would get beaten by the media stick?

Who would comedians on panel shows use to deride?

And how would fans of other clubs be able to justify trouble at one of their fixtures without saying ‘at least we’re not as bad as Millwall’?

People love a villain and Millwall have been casted as football’s biggest one.

But don’t get me wrong, I’m no Millwall apologist.

I know we are far from angels and I also recognise we have absorbed this view of us by others and made it the foundation of our whole identity.

After all, the chant you will hear most at The Den is ‘no-one likes us, we don’t care’, both a nod to our notorious image and a declaration of our siege mentality because of it.

However, this does not mean others should not look a little bit closer to home before having a faceless pop at Millwall FC on a social network site to deflect away from their own club’s issues.

I think the only way a non-Millwall fan could understand the conundrum of our experiences is by following England to somewhere like Italy, and then reading the Daily Mail account of it.

Look, we know we are far from perfect, but I think the rest of football depends on it.

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