Celery! Celery! So Chelsea have banned three fans for throwing the crunchy vegetable about, and put one of English football’s more obscure traditions in the limelight.

Chelsea were so bad in the 1980s they nearly fell into England’s third division, and supporters soon found other ways of keeping themselves amused at matches. Out of nowhere the (unprintable) celery song became a favourite, especially at away games when the blue and white army would smuggle in pounds of the stuff to the delight of greengrocers all over the country.

Sticks of it would fly around, occasionally landing around players from other teams as they prepared to take a corner, but not hurled in malice.

Celery went out of fashion at Stamford Bridge, replaced by fake Ruud Gullit dreadlocks and Russian fur hats as the team were transformed into champions.

The Tottenham fan who ran onto the pitch to throw a punch at Chelsea’s Frank Lampard
– at the same recent game as the latest celery outbreak — is a reminder of the violence no one wants to see back in football.

But the celery revival perhaps points to a nostalgia for the wilder, more unpredictable days of the terraces that make English football now, for all its world-class players and state-of-the-art stadia, seem a little boring.

William Schomberg is a Reuters correspondent based in Brussels