Kick England and Russia out of Euros, World Cup
Don’t think hooliganism may not come to NZ one day, Mark Reason writes.
Britain is broken. A madman shoots dead a member of parliament outside a library. And so we the world look away from the repugnant violence that is sweeping across the European Championships in France, forcing schools and shops to close and thousands of policemen to take to the streets with batons and tear gas and water cannons. But please don’t let this decent woman’s tragic death be an excuse to let sport get away with it again.
We know from the famous broken windows policy in New York that all crime is part of the same living organism. If you can wipe out the smaller bacteria, then you have a chance of stopping the killer viruses. So please let’s have a proper Brexit. Let’s kick England and Russia out of this year’s European Championships and out of the 2018 World Cup.
I can hear the liberal squeal go up – ‘‘But you’re punishing the real supporters.’’ Sorry, but these thugs are real supporters and they cause real damage to people’s lives. What about all the people who are now in hospital as a result of these thugs, including one 51-year-old man who suffered brain injuries, cardiac arrest and a lung infection.
What about the thousands of police men and women who are not at home with their families because they were forced to do overtime to deal with these hooligans? What about the kids who are not in class because the gates of the schools in Lille are shut for the day? What about the cafe owners who have their premises broken up? What about the street cleaners who have to mop up after the scum?
Look, some of you may be thinking what does this have to do with us in New Zealand. But don’t think it may not come here one day. Hooliganism is one of Britain’s biggest exports. The English have been particularly successful in sharing it with the world. They took it to Argentina where Newell Old Boys, named after a British educator, has one of the most vicious sets of fans in the world.
Russia openly admits it learned from the English. The leader of one of the country’s most notorious mobs sold his flat to go to Euro 96 and sit on a lion in Trafalgar Square, filming fans riot after they lost to Germany in the semifinals. He went home and taught his countrymen how to be a hooligan with his educational video.
This new generation of Russian fan goes out to the forest to confront each other. They wear gum shields and martial arts gloves. They revive the old ‘‘stenka na stenku’’, wall on wall, which was outlawed in the 1950s, where two lines of opposing ‘‘tribes’’ walk toward each other and have to take out the opposite ‘‘brick’’ in the wall by any means.
This need to fight for the tribe seems to be buried deep in our genes, only it is not so buried. Bill Buford, an American journalist, infiltrated the hooligan gangs to research a 1990 book called Among The Thugs. Buford wrote, ‘‘The supporters did not like the stranger. The foreigner was the one they really hated...The crowd is in all of us. It’s going to go off.’’
And it’s going off in France: English fans, in their three-quarter length shorts, shaven heads, beer bellies, arms raised wide, shouting, ‘‘Raise your hands if you hate the French’’ and ‘‘F... off Russia, we’re England and Wales’’. Russian fans coming in from the side streets: organised, sober, lethal, who ‘‘want to show that the English are girls’’.
The English hurl chairs into their midst and belch, ‘‘F... off Europe, we’re all voting out’’, ‘‘10 German bombers’’ and ‘‘If it wasn’t for the English you’d be krauts’’. The Russians fire off flares and climb over barriers to kick the English teeth back down their throats. The English haven’t come prepared with mouthguards. The Russians call it ‘‘voinushka, a little war, something to get the blood up’’.
Cheering from the sidelines is Igor Lebedev, a parliamentary deputy speaker and a member of the Russian Football Union’s executive committee. He says, ‘‘In nine out of 10 cases, football fans go to games to fight and that’s normal. The lads defended the honour of their country and did not let the English fans desecrate our motherland. We should forgive and understand our fans.’’
The Russians ‘‘ultras’’ take the English flags and hang them upside down, spotted with blood, like scalps. Vitaly Mutko, the Russian sports minister, applauds from the stands. An English fan says, ‘‘The rush and buzz you get from it is unreal. You don’t get it from anything else.’’
‘‘Be safe, be sensible,’ pleads England captain Wayne Rooney, but the world is deaf.
These young men want a country to defend. One QC observed, ‘‘The state no longer recognises any virtue in masculinity. Britain has always had world-class yobs. The British Empire was built because it was its yobs who could mine coal and make steel, and who could fire guns on ships faster and fix bayonets more effectively than anyone else in the world.’’
The genius of New Zealand was to get its ‘‘yobs’’ to play rugby rather than football. They get to have a choreographed fight in the afternoon. They are allowed to beat each other up. There is an outlet for that tribal aggression. It’s okay to stand to attention during the anthem like a row of squaddies, do a war dance and then kick the bara brith out of Wales.
But soccer-centric Europe is in a state of emergency right now. The looming Brexit vote is a magnet for nationalism. Machines are replacing manual labour and there is an awful lot of unused physical energy out there. The Lions supporters are traditionally a sociable, humorous bunch, but the odd lout has just started jumping on the bandwagon. These young men need something to hit. Next year it could be New Zealand.