Jack Grealish punched: Fan attack is byproduct of austerity-stricken Britain's identity crisis

As shocking as the incident with Jack Grealish was, it wasn’t all that surprising. There was the clear forewarning from what happened with Rangers player James Tavernier at Hibernian in midweek, where many predicted it wouldn’t be long until something like this happened. A matter of days in fact.

The Birmingham derby plumbed new depths of negative behaviour, but this is really about so much more than the ferocity of this fixture.

This incident is the inevitable consequence of social media football culture that has reached troubling levels of tribalism, where partisanship has become so poisonous; where nothing matters other than your side; where anything is justified as long as it is on that side. That could be seen and heard in the braying morons who cheered the Birmingham City supporter off after his cowardly attack on Grealish.

It is also a byproduct of an austerity-stricken Britain going through an identity crisis, cleaved through the centre, and where the most toxic type of debate and aggression reigns. Knife-crime and hate-crime have shot up. That’s what this atmosphere results in.

It is thereby more than football’s problem. It is, as tends to generally be the case with such situations, society’s problem.

To a certain degree, talk of football fans “going back to the dark ages” is correct, because that is what has happened in Britain as a whole. For so many reasons, an angrier, more right-wing and nationalistic has been tapped into, and released.

That does not mean there shouldn’t be specific football punishments that the sport needs to deal with.

It is an incident so outrageous, but yet still so easy to see being repeated due to the nature of crowd control, that it requires strong deterrents, to go with the strongest possible punishments for the individual responsible. West Ham United only got fined £100,000 for last season’s pitch invasion, which now feels paltry and insufficient in the context of this.

This is why suggestions of a points deduction or fixtures being played behind closed doors are warranted. It would encourage a level of self-policing among crowds, and something different to the crowing from Birmingham fans we saw here.

To be a supporter who cost your club points – and maybe a trophy, promotion or even survival – suddenly means a lot more than just being someone punished for punching an opposition player from behind, something they seemed to take pride in. Many likely consider him a hero. That’s the depressing place we are in.

There is also the trickier concept of punishing the club, although they do bear responsibility for their support – particularly when there is a history of escalating incidents.

Grealish of course took responsibility in the best possible way, by scoring the winner.

“It’s the best day of my life,” he understandably crowed later, and few could fault him.

There’s a lot of fault in this wider incident, though, that reflects a bad time in the wider world.