The Tigers winger made a positive impact off the bench despite their crushing defeat
Abu Kamara knew he was in for a rough ride on his first return to Norwich City barely a month after leaving the club to join Hull City on deadline day, he was going to be the pantomime villain.
Warnings from Canaries boss Johannes Hoff Thorup for home fans to go easy on the 21-year-old were always unlikely to be heeded given the world we live in, and so it proved.
On a day when Norwich, who were lauded for their powerful video last year, dedicated their matchday programme and pre-match messaging to World Mental Health Day – including a pre-match ‘Minute’s Unsilence’ where they encouraged all fans to talk to each other, while both sets of players went into a huddle – and Samaritans splashed across their shirts, it was somewhat galling to see the abuse aimed at Kamara during his warm-up on the side of the Carrow Road pitch – in the end, Joao Pedro went along to give him some moral support.
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Unfortunately for Kamara, the game was going badly. His new club were behind, and though he came on and made a real difference for the Tigers, it was ultimately for a lost cause with his new club going down to a heavy 4-0 defeat in Norfolk, which further emboldened some of the home fans. Had the away side not been 3-0 down when he came on, and instead been leading, then perhaps things might have been different, or even more toxic; we will never know.
To his credit, Kamara, as he trudged off the pitch after applauding the away supporters, clapped the home fans, including some of those who had been giving him abuse, before being met by assistant boss Filip Tapalovic, who put his arm around him and walked him down the tunnel.
To understand why the strength of feeling was as it was, you have to go back into the details of the move. Kamara had been at Norwich since the age of 11, though he had rarely been involved in the first team. Last season, he spent the season on loan at Portsmouth and played a massive role in their promotion to the Championship.
He returned to Carrow Road this summer but had decided, that after a decade at Norwich, he wanted a fresh challenge and to go somewhere else, despite scoring on his full debut against Stevenage in the Carabao Cup in the first week of the season – just one of six first team appearances for the club. He lodged a transfer request in a bid to get the move to the MKM Stadium after City made a big effort to sign him, and paid a fair amount of money for him.
Naturally, news of his desire to leave Carrow Road didn’t go down well and it was always going to be the case that his first return would always be a difficult one, and one to just get through, which he did with his head held high.
There’s a line that is acceptable, the generic, light-hearted taunting of ‘Abu, what’s the score’ and booing is normal, and we all laugh and have a smile, but when it gets offensive and downright unacceptable, it needs to be called out. Football can and should do better. It’s changing, the world is changing, and the game has to follow suit, to bury your head in the sand and make excuses is part of the problem.
No doubt there will be people reading this demanding I get a grip (to put it politely here), and all manner of other obscenities based on the social media reaction, but this is part of the problem. You can’t call on people to talk about their mental health on the one hand, and on the next, criticise people for raising it and the impact those actions may have.
It’s not OK to just say deal with it, accept it, it is part and parcel of the game, or grow up, toughen up – insert suitable lame excuse here – we shouldn’t just accept it, for too long, we just accept abuse and that’s one of many reasons so many people die by suicide every day, not everybody can – one person dies every 90 minutes.
Kamara is a young kid, a human being, one with family, friends and feelings. He wanted to move for his career. It’s football, that is OK. Give him light-hearted stick, stuff he can laugh about, stuff that we can accept as harmless fun on the terraces, but there has to be a line and that was crossed at Carrow Road. No matter how many people abuse me for raising it, tell me to stop being ‘woke’, and all that other childish nonsense, won’t change how it was bang out of order and should not just be accepted because that’s what we’ve always done.