There were several new players in February: John Durnin returned, plus Rob McKinnon, Jonny Blom, Shaun Teale and Stephen Halliday arrived.
There were several games that were postponed due to the pitch being waterlogged. But there was also the controversially re-arranged AWS match against Hartlepool which was moved to their ground after two postponements. However, Carlisle had the last laugh with a glorious win :-)
There have been many occasions over the years when Carlisle United supporters have shown themselves to be not quite the politically correct group that I would hope for. However, the events of 19 February 2000 were an extreme case where for virtually the entire game, a group of over 50 fans shouted racist and anti-gay chants at Leo Fortune-West, the Rotherham striker. I have created a page with my original posting to the Carlisle United Internet Mailing List and the subsequent comments from other list members. I followed this up with a similar teletext submission for 2000-02-24 for the Thursday night following the Rotherham match and also a letter to Carlisle United commenting that they should make a statement about it.
While some would argue that this is just making too much of "jokey" terrace banter, we have to remember that tolerating intolerance at any level simply pushes back the line of what is OK until we wake up one day and find that we are the subject of that intolerance.
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