‘Redjacking’ and interaction with away fans
07/03/05 | by Alan Fisher

I’m quite a demonstrative football fan, most blokes probably are. As a relatively mild mannered person in every day life I’ve always treated football as my outlet – and certainly watching Forest over the years it’s provided ample channels to purge anger, joy and nearly everything else on the emotional spectrum! The drawback with this is you can get drawn into behaviour that may be deemed against the policy at the City Ground. For example, the heinous act of a ‘wanker sign’ could get you ejected from the ground (if you are a Forest fan directing it at an away fan – it doesn’t seem to matter the other way around), and copious swearing is likely to get you in trouble too.

Now whilst I deplore the double-standards, to be honest I don’t really think that the restrictions based on our behaviour are that unreasonable – we’re all civilised people and even in an emotionally charged environment we should try to retain a bit of that. We are not animals, which means ultimately we can think up better and more intelligent means of getting the psychological upper hand when faced with fans of the opposing team. After being asked a couple of times to calm down by the men in yellow at Forest I’ve been developing a new line of waving, smiling and laughing at away fans, and it seems to work a treat!

At the Spurs match I saw a chap who I’d been smiling at point me out to a steward for perpetrating this horrific act! How many times have you actually felt offended by a leering away fan masturbating the air at you? Never? I thought not. Well when you are that leering fan I bet they’re not offended either – best to just smile benevolently, like you’re indulging a small child having a tantrum. Perhaps you could point at them and laugh uproariously. Shrug your shoulders at them and look slightly puzzled as their striker kicks it over from two yards. Perhaps in really extreme circumstances you could affront their sexuality by blowing kisses to them (but only in really extreme circumstances).

For most fans this might not be such an issue as the away fans are far enough away that you don’t have that ‘one to one’ experience that us lucky folk in Capital One corner enjoy – being on the front row affords immense gloating pleasures when we’re doing well (so not this season!), but it does rather put you under the microscope when things are not doing so well. Thus this psychological toolkit could be the difference between a nervous breakdown and a rational football fan.

But this new set of tactics is just scratching the surface.

I recently upgraded my mobile phone having had the last one a year – and amongst the features it boasts is Bluetooth connectivity. In short, this is a means for devices to transfer data wirelessly over radio waves to other Bluetooth enabled devices. In layman's terms, you can send pictures and sounds to other mobile phones with this technology when they’re in range. The range for Bluetooth is about 10 metres.

I sit right above the away end. I think you can see where I’m going here…

Another thing my phone does is allows me to take pictures, and then superimpose text over them. So, for example, I could create a picture of a Forest tree (which I created by taking a picture of the one on my shirt), and caption it with something like “There’s only one Sol Campbell”, and then search for devices in range with something like ‘Spurs’ or ‘THFC’ in their name. When Forest play Spurs at the City Ground there is a surprising number of those in range!

When I first attempted this little scheme we were playing Derby, and unfortunately their fans were more reluctant to reveal who they were by the names of their phones – but upon sending a Forest tree randomly to as many phones in range as I could find it was amazing how many renamed themselves various expletives (like "F**k off", or "Treehugging wanker", etc) – job done!

Yes, it’s childish, but it is a far more satisfying and civilised manner in which to purge all of those unkind impulses and thoughts we all have when faced by the supporters of our opponents. I think the techie term for sending random things to strangers over Bluetooth is called 'Bluejacking' – so maybe doing it in the cause of supporting Forest should be called 'Redjacking'.