She Wore A Scarlet Ribbon – Melissa Moore (Part 1)

From Minneapolis to Clapham, police violence has been heavily in the spotlight for the past twelve months. One woman who hasn’t been at all surprised by the events we’ve seen played out on our screens this year is Melissa Moore, a well known face at games across Britain and Europe, who is so fed up of the police violence she’s witnessed at the match that she’s gone to law school to qualify as a solicitor so she can defend those on the receiving end in the courtroom as well as on the streets. Once known for being a gobby jibber always on the fringes of trouble, she’s now using her years of matched-honed skills in challenging the police and outsmarting dishonest officials to become a legal champion for marginalised underdogs. Interview and write up by Carly Vandella.

I was born in Wythenshawe and grew up in Altrincham, or “Alty” as everyone round there calls it. On that side of South Manchester, the Trafford side, there wasn’t really any question growing up about who you’d support. Everyone you knew was a Red. You’d bump into the players in Alty all the time; United was always around you. My Gran was from Gorse Hill, and she and her older brother, my Uncle Earl, used to go up to the ground in the 20s and 30s when the match was on and try and get in – very early jibbers! – or stand on an old wooden box that oranges came in and try and see over the wall. When we were kids and she looked after us, we’d go for a walk round the area near the ground – Longford Park, Gorse Hill Park, the Cenotaph on Chester Road. I remember vividly that at that point in the early 80s, a lot of the area around the ground was still derelict wasteland of areas that had been bombed during the war and never rebuilt. Where Tesco is now was a lot of grass where you could still see the gateposts of some of the houses that had been demolished. The route in from Alty along Washway Road and Chester Road has changed so much now but when I was a kid, I used to absolutely buzz off the trip up to the ground and into town; coming in on the bus and seeing the big block of flats in Stretford; the Essoldo, the Civic Hall and then finally the ground. It felt like all roads led to Old Trafford.

My parents weren’t into football; my Dad was into rugby and played to a decent standard. His Dad though played football for Alty. They were builders and had built the terraces at Alty’s ground, Moss Lane. My brother was really athletic and had trials for United when he was 13, but bust his knee during the trial. My first games were with a friend of my Dad’s. What I was actually interested in at first when I was really little wasn’t football, it was crowds. I loved crowds, whatever they were for. l was intrigued by the people – so many different people, the buzz of the crowd – whether it was a market, the couple of hundred who were going in the Golf Road End at Alty or whatever. At that time in the ‘80s, going to football wasn’t really something many girls were doing. It was a time when there was a wave of what seemed to be some sort of tragedy or violent incident at football almost every week. My Mum wasn’t really happy about me being into the football, but it was all around us. I’d play with our kid – I was always in goal, obviously – and we’d sing United songs in the playground at school, songs passed down from older brothers that were sung like nursery rhymes. “Blue moon, you started singing too soon…” I knew three City fans, who were brothers, and I went to the Derby at Maine Road with them for a birthday treat for one of them, for what turned out to be the 5-1. We were in the Main Stand because their Dad was big in the rag trade. We had to leave at half time because it was absolute mayhem, and obviously United were losing which wasn’t good for me. But I was like “Wow, this is amazing”. Again, it was the crowd – the venom, the passion, the smell of hatred, it was gobsmacking.

I first started going to United regularly with my mate from school and her older brother. When he had to look after her at the weekend he’d make her go to the match with him, so I tagged along and went with them. He’d fuck off away from us as soon as we got in the ground and say “Meet us at the bus stop after”, not wanting to be seen with two giddy little girls, so we were left to our own devices in the ground from a very young age. What you’ve got to remember about those times in the mid to late ‘80s, the ground wasn’t always full, or buzzing. A lot of the time it wasn’t that busy, and you could just run up and down the terraces. People had their set places that they liked to stand, but there were gaps, and it was cold, and you never wanted to go and use the toilets. People forget it wasn’t always the roaring, jolly experience that some people’s memories and nostalgia would have you believe. It wasn’t always that loud, it wasn’t always that full. It was always interesting though. Despite it being a massive terrace and there being thousands of fans in there, people had their own favourite regular spots. It’s all that psychogeographical stuff about being attached to a certain place, having your own little spot where you belong, your own little kingdom. It always fascinated me, all the different little groups. Also, coming from Alty, it isn’t the most diverse of places, and there you’d have all these people from all over the place, these places that ridiculously were very exotic to a 12 year old, like Moston, or Little Hulton, or even London, which at that point seemed like the ends of the Earth. There were all these different little tribes, it was a real eye opener. There were so many different people stood shoulder to shoulder, a real melting pot – lawyer, doctor, binman, postman. You had no idea most of the time what anyone did for a living because social status in the outside world didn’t matter, you were all there for that one purpose. You could shed your workday clothes and just be whoever you wanted – scream, shout, get it out. I think of them as the best days of my life but everyone thinks that about when they were young don’t they?

I loved the fact that football was real, live, pulled at all your emotions, and that you could have this massive emotional experience with thousands of other people for a few hours in an afternoon. When you’re 13/14, that’s when you’re moulding yourself and discovering who and what you want to be, and I very quickly decided that I wanted to be United. I was meeting so many different people and it was like “Wow, this is a world that I’d never even contemplated, and what, you travel everywhere across the world doing this? I want to do that!” I wanted to be part of a marauding army, part of that connected group of people. It was so viceral, as soon as you started going to a couple of matches it started getting obsessive. So I applied for a chequebook, and got a job at 14 to get the money to be able to go, and suddenly I just went “Right, I’m going to go to as many matches as I possibly can do, without necessarily telling my mother where I’m going”. It was a permanent buzz, seeing people, being part of something that was bigger than myself. I suppose it’s like what people say when they get into religion, it’s like an enlightenment – “join the cult”. The history as well fascinated me. I’d always studied history and been into reading and the more I learnt about the history of the club and how it was entwined with the history of Manchester and the ship canal the more I felt connected to it all. It felt like something that was quite integral to my nationality as a Mancunian, it felt like this was where I was supposed to be. I always say that by the way – Mancunian is my nationality, United is my religion. That’s what I’ll be putting on my census form. It became like an addiction, “I need more and more, I’ll go that that game, and that one, how can I get on a National Express over to Sheffield without any money?” The whole thing was intoxicating; the challenge of getting there, the cameraderie of queing up from lunchtime outside the ground, the whole thing of having to go to OT and get tickets and meeting people in the queue and seeing people that were very very different from where I’d grown up. I started taking some of the nice posh girls from my school to the match for a bit – you can imagine what they thought. It was still pay on the gate then and you didn’t have to apply six weeks in advance so on a Saturday when we met up I’d be like “I think we should go to the football, do you want to come to the football?” and bizarrely, for better or worse, some of them would always come, and be appalled! I’d be like a tour guide, I’d do the whole thing of “Come up the steps, look at the pitch, isn’t it stunning?” I’ve always loved that, taking people to the match and being like “Welcome to my world”.

When I started going there weren’t that many women at the match but there were definitely some brilliant women there. Cockney Di, Teresa McDonald, who was very visible as she was always selling the fanzine [Red News]. There’s an unspoken hierarchy of respect at the football, and Teresa was right at the top of it. She had a real aura. All these blokes adored her because she was such a stalwart, and so lovely, a real inclusive leader of people even though she never would have put herself up there as a leader. She was a real inspiration, someone who went as a woman without a man taking her. She wasn’t going with her husband, she went because she wanted to go. In a sense, United was very egalitarian in that respect – if you were time served, you were respected, man or woman. But you had to get past that point of being time served, and for a girl, until you got to that point there was always an innate sexism, Men did think that because you were in a crowd, that they could come and touch you. That sort of thing used to happen when I was VERY young – looking back now, I think, what the fuck?! Football was a great learning experience for a young girl. You learnt about people, and you learnt how to hit men where it hurts. You learnt to be able to chat back. There weren’t that many other women who were going on their own, but I met other women who some readers may know – Ali, Nat & Nic, Linz, a girl called Faith who used to go everywhere, Suzanne from Northwich. I had to hit someone for her once. Porto ’97 when it all went off, we were in a crush on the way into the ground when the police were being cunts, and she was pregnant, quite big and quite far along. These two dickheads, Cockneys, started having a go at her – “You shouldn’t be in here being pregnant, what do you think you’re doing, you should be at home in the kitchen”. Proper nasty sexist shit making out like she was in the wrong when it was the police who were causing all the issues, as ever. I was like “Don’t you fucking dare say that again” and the main one smirked “Oh yeah, and what are you going to do about it?” So I fucking dropped him. Hit him and he fell to the floor and his mate disappeared. Fucking ridiculous, in the middle of something awful instead of backing her up and looking out for her they instead decided to turn on her and felt they were able to do so because they were surrounded by blokes, and the men around them just looked the other way. You get that a lot, and you think “Hang on, why is it that I’m the one who’s talking, why am I having to stand up now, you blokes around should be fucking sorting this.” When you’re in a packed situation, a lot of the time they’ll just let things slide, when they should be self-policing. There are a lot of diamonds in our support though. It’s always interesting, that sociological study of crowd behaviour and what people feel able to do and get away with in a crowd.

The crowd at Old Trafford has obviously changed massively in the time I’ve been going. It started with the demolition of the Stretford End and the move to being all-seater. It could have got a lot worse if Murdoch had taken over in ‘99, but we fought him off. Post 2000, there was a bit of a lull. We’d won the Treble, we’d beaten Murdoch, and everyone was sort of floating in this post-reality state of “What else is there to do?” We won it back to back to back and I don’t remember much about it despite being there because we started taking it all for granted. And we all took our eyes off the ball. We beat Murdoch and thought “Well we’ve done it, we saved the club, the threat has passed” and didn’t all necessarily think “Well, United is still a company, there are still shareholders who will be keen to take their money out for a big payday”. And then the Glazers came along and that’s how it was allowed to happen. We were all in a bubble where all was right with the world. I know a lot of people who drifted away after ’99, who said “There’s nothing else I can see us doing, I’ve seen it all, what’s the point?” By the time we got to 2005 it felt like there had been a huge cultural shift. There was a generation going to the match who had never stood on a terrace. Anywhere, not just at Old Trafford. The difference in being able to mobilise people was huge. People were more separate, more individual. When terracing went, people didn’t mix as much at the match. You’re in a fixed seat, you’re with the same people every week, you don’t talk to other people and get that range of opinions and get your mind changed and talk to people about issues like ownership. You end up in an echo chamber and not necessarily aware of what is going on in other sections of the ground. We found that out a lot with the recent Save The Scoreboard campaign. A lot of discussion between fans now isn’t face to face, it has moved online where you don’t know who anyone is and what their motivations are and ideas move so quickly that you can never have a real consensus across the fanbase. When things are discussed on the internet, it’s loudest voice wins, and the people at the forefront aren’t necessarily the real leaders you need that will get shit done. During the anti-Murdoch campaign and in the days of IMUSA, the leaders of the movement were real, charismatic people that you’d see, in person, at the match. Not faceless internet accounts. Say what you want now about people like Andy Walsh but Andy was an incredible orator with a real human touch, and he was visible, accessible, and took the time to talk to and understand people. Every so often when the anti-Glazer thing comes up again, the people trying to lead it are not people who have been to matches and that’s why it fails. There is no connection, no understanding. On the internet, their opinion appears to be worth as much as someone who has been going for 60 years, who has had that physical engagement with other fans and with the club for so long. There has always been a hierarchy of respect at the match and you have to fucking earn that respect. Certainly as a girl you sure as shit had to do everything twice as well as everyone else to earn it. And not just show your tits on the internet. That said, I did actually show my tits once at the match at an anti-Murdoch protest againt Southampton. It took 8 or 9 coppers to get me out which I think is a fucking record. I had some flag over the back of me – Not for Sale I think it said. I tried to go and vault the fence at the bottom of the Stretford End and as I tried to jump the advertising hoarding the fucking wind got behind this flag and stopped me dead and billowed out behind me. I hit the deck with a right wallop, I didn’t even make it onto the fucking pitch. But I did have me tits out to try and get some attention and get on camera – but that was for a cause, not for Instagram.

One thing I’ve always loved about being in a football crowd is shouting and singing. I hate it’s when it’s quiet. I’ll sing on my own if it’s quiet, I’d rather that than be bored. But I love that whole thing of being able to start something, a chant or a song, and then a thousand people, ten thousand people, are all singing that thing that you started. It’s a massive adrenaline rush. I’ve always been intrigued by the violence aspect as well, unsurprisingly. It’s the experience of the violence from the police and the way they deal with crowds – badly – that has led me to studying law and working towards becoming a solicitor. One of the early experiences that made me consider going down that path was Juventus away, that first time we went in 1996. It had been fucking mental. All the Juve lot were hiding behind the car park waiting to try and get a scrap when we came out and there were plenty in our end willing to give it to them. There was row upon row of coppers pushing United fans back as we were trying to leave the ground. Now I’ve got quite basic Italian but it’s a lot better when I’m shitfaced. So I went to the front and there were a lot of older people and kids, quite a mixed bag. So I was saying to the police and stewards “What are you doing, why don’t you let this lot and the ones going on the official coaches out? It’s the people who are the most vulnerable and trying to get safely back to the coaches that are at the front that you’re having a go at”. I got a slap for being so vocal. After that it got a bit fraught and everyone just steamrollered the police. You see this constantly with the police, in the UK and abroad where it’s like, if you’d just let us through it wouldn’t be an issue. The police create that “them and us” situation which is not needed. Police create the incident themselves a lot of the time by refusing to listen to the more reasonable parts of the crowd, not appealing to that side, and instead just steaming in to slap people. You see it all the time – Italy, France, Spain in particular, and over here too obviously. Compare that to northern Europe, it’s very different. If the police stand back and don’t get involved, nothing happens, because the more pissed up and aggro elements don’t have anyone to go up against and aren’t getting wound up. It always surprises me that policing in this country in particular hasn’t moved on. They are still using the exact same tactics as they’ve always done, at football, and at protests. Football is a training ground for them for when they’re dealing with political issues and protests – pulling people out, harassing them, restricting their rights – treating people as less than human, and that’s what creates that friction. That’s why people lose faith in the police. Going to football, you see a side to policing which if I had grown up and never gone to football I never would have seen, and wouldn’t have understood why ACAB is all over every wall. There is a general refusal by the police to understand that a crowd is made up of individuals – it’s not a blob that needs destroying. All the research into policing and crowd control shows that when the police are present but stand back and don’t get involved, there isn’t an issue.

So this is why I’ve ended up working in law. Law has always been my vocation, it just took me a while to realise it. From going watching football you realise that when you decide to be a football supporter who actually goes to games you get put into a second tier of humanity and treated differently by the police. That shouldn’t be the case. You should not be treated as a second class citizen because of what you choose to do with your leisure time. I want to challenge that. A lot of the problems fans encounter where they end up in the court system are not necessarily about the police knowing they can get away with stuff, but more like they know that there won’t be a comeback from people and they won’t be challenged because people don’t know how the legal system works and don’t know how to appeal and prove that the police are often in the wrong. I’ve always taken it upon myself to educate myself about it and I’m lucky that I have had a decent education and I can read the law and understand it. I’ve been helping people do their statements, going through what to say and what not to say when interacting with the police. I’ve been arrested at various matches where a lot of the time it wasn’t necessarily that I’d done anything wrong myself but I’ve obstructed the police from going and hassling somebody else who is in a worse state than me. Now that I’m in the legal profession I can do it but not get nicked for doing it! Arguing with a copper when you’re drunk, on the street, at a football match, you’re never going to win. But if you’re there in your suit behind a desk with a judge watching, they can’t get away with half as much.

There was a time at Middlesbrough when a steward said that I had punched her, which I hadn’t. I was nicked and the case went to court, and I decided to represent myself. My initial defence of “If I’d hit you, you’d have fucking felt it” admittedly wasn’t a brilliant thing to have said in court but when I got her on the witness box and questioned her, she ended up crying and admitting she’d made it all up because she wanted to be noticed at work. The police were made to apologise by the judge because I made it clear they had never seen it happen and had just gone on the steward’s word, they kept saying “Well we thought it had happened…” but I proved that they had no actaul evidence and after the steward admitted it was all made up and it was thrown out the judge made them apologise to me. They do say “If you represent yourself you have a fool for a client”, so thats why I’m doing it for other people now. I want to be first aid for football fans and challenge that mass criminalisation of football supporters, and I also want to work at protests and and for people going about their normal lives, making sure that people don’t have their rights and their livelihoods taken away from them just on the say-so of the police. It’s quite expensive to get represented at the moment. Legal aid has been squeezed so much that a lot of people do end up having to represent themselves. I want to help those who are in that situation at the football because I know the background to football and hope I can use that knowledge to help other people out. I’ve completed all my studies now to Masters level and just need to do a year full time of being supervised to fully qualify. Then I want to do the police station representative course which is literally first aid where you’re actually going into the cells as legal first response for people. Sadly because of Covid they’re not allowing extra people into the cells so you cant do it at the moment as a trainee but the current situation is giving me time to get my other work together and make sure that I really really know my shit. As soon as all this is over I’m going to be straight in there, boots first. They genuinely aren’t going to know what’s hit them!

Part 2 of our interview with Melissa where we delve into the murky world of jibbing will be coming next week. Subscribe to the blog or follow us on Twitter or Facebook to get notified when it’s released.