Nazareth wrote:andymackem wrote:
Yes, it's good of the Scots to keep their hooliganism for their own domestic encounters. I seem to recall when I was in Glasgow being told that on the night of an Old Firm game Monklands Hospital would have the busiest casualty department in Europe.
Well that is the difference, the scottish fans are one of the best in the world, when they go abroad they usually behave well. The rangers-celtic thing, well i am continually repulsed by it. But you have also got to bear in mind that there is a lot of ireland in glasgow.
So all Scots support St Mirren and Albion Rovers apart from the Scottish squad, do they? And the Old Firm's quadrenniel outpouring of hatred is simply an Irish dispute shifted a few miles east? This is the kind of woolly, one-size-fits-all thinking that ensures anyone from England wearing a football shirt is treated with wary suspicion whenever they cross the channel. Can I get away with saying that I'm constantly repulsed by English fans' behaviour abroad, but shrug and say there's a lot of people from Essex over there? Blame some other bunch of c**t?
Karst: quite right about the France 1998 game. I stand corrected.
But it does underscore my point that hooliganism is not, and should not be seen as an exclusively English problem - it is as widespread as football.
RS: I've had the pleasure of work experience in Airdrie. The casualty department looked like one of the more desirable venues in town, to be fair. Horrid place, and Coatbridge looked no better. I scuttled happily back to Glasgow at the first opportunity, and started looking for jobs down south!
One other point that hasn't yet been raised is the role the English media plays in stoking the hooligan fires. First of all, it would be a fantastic story if England were hoyed out of the Euros because of their fans. The press could fill pages on it: outrage at being told what to do by Europe; hand-wringing at the state of young Englishmen abroad; defiance and reports of provocation; moaning that everyone else is just as bad (hey, I just wrote that thesis myself!); self-worshipping accounts of the violence with good close-ups of the baton charges and the meetings of fist and face. It's great stuff and it sells papers by the bucketload.
So, every scuffle become a fight, every fight a riot and suddenly every Englishman on the continent is swept up into an orgy of destruction and violence. Meanwhile our pressmen and TV crews are there to record every juicy detail. And if it doesn't happen "naturally", they will start to distort things.
Don't believe me? In 2000 I went to Charleroi to see England beat Germany. You may recall TV footage of the town square, and the ensuing riot. Watch it closely, and you'll see the same cafe table complete a 360-degree swing round after being hurled into the fray. The footage was taken from four fixed CCTV cameras in each corner of the square, and spliced together to make a short skirmish resemble a protracted brawl.
Reports as we were travelling to the game led us to expect a war zone. On arrival in the town we mingled happily in bars, drinking with German fans, chanting and singing in rowdy but hardly aggressive fashion. This was after the alleged riot, when you might have expected things to be a bit more tense.
After the match there was a problem with the trains back to Brussels. While we waited, on a hot, crowded and poorly ventilated old train British press crews on the platform did everything they could to persuade us that we were being badly treated by the Belgians and we should "stand up for ourselves". Thankfully no-one took them up on that offer, but it was obvious where the next day's headlines might have come from.
I'm guessing that other countries' media don't make such deliberate efforts to present their nations in such a poor light, which contributes to the idea of the English disease.
It's sad that this always happens, and it's sadder when I start reading about England fans being urged not to travel away (Macedonia, Turkey) or seeing supposedly intelligent comment pieces urging that we don't get involved in competitive sport any more. Personally I've watched a fair amount of football on the continent, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. A shared love of the game is a great way of overcoming a language barrier, as I found last week discussing the Euros with various Russians I met on my travels. Don't destroy that because of some other arseholes who can't behave themselves.
