Our expectations of football fans seem to be so low – has it always been like this?

There was something moving about the entire crowd at Anfield applauding for Cristiano Ronaldo in the seventh minute on Tuesday night. The “moment of the game,” said Jürgen Klopp, “so many things are much more important in life than football”. He is right of course. It is rare when two sets of supporters – especially rivals – come together for any reason.

But when you step back and think about it, isn’t it the least we should expect? Being respectful and supportive of someone going through a personal tragedy shouldn’t be a surprising way to act. What does it say about our expectations of football fans and their extreme tribalism that this moment was viewed as a kind of zenith of human behaviour?

Our expectations are naturally low for a reason. In the same game, a section of Manchester United fans were filmed singing “The Sun was right, you’re murderers” to the Liverpool fans. Days earlier, Manchester City fans caused a minute’s silence to be truncated because they couldn’t hold back from chanting about that avoidable catastrophe.

As David Conn tweeted: “Football fans who disrespect the Hillsborough disaster don’t even understand that they’re just indulging lies spread by South Yorkshire police to evade responsibility for 97 people unlawfully killed.”

Those fans, at that moment, probably aren’t really thinking anything beyond goading the opposition – identical to those who’ve sung about the Munich air disaster. It’s all fair game. Forget humanity. We’re in a crowd. Everyone else is doing it. We’re (whoever) FC, we’ll sing what we like.

And fair play if you can find a set of fans who haven’t chanted or done something grim in their recent history. From Chelsea fans singing Roman Abramovich’s name during a tribute to Ukraine