A brutal wake-up call for the English game
IT’S ‘A VEHICLE FOR THUGGERY’
BARONESS LOUISE CASEY delivered a 129-page wake-up call to English football fans yesterday that she said must be a “turning point” for future behaviour.
The cross-party peer’s report made a point of offering no scapegoats for the mayhem that surrounded the Euro 2020 final at Wembley, and wanted it instead to be a blueprint for a better way forward.
“If we are a country that can’t get a grip of our fans, then we have a problem,” said Baroness Casey, below.
“The bottom line is that type of criminal behaviour hasn’t gone away, that’s the main thing that has to be tackled here.
“Why is it acceptable for footballers to receive racist chants by their own countrymen? What is going on in this country?
“Mass thuggery. Drinking from nine in the morning, urinating all over the place, throwing faeces at stewards. We have a problem and we need to sort it out.
“I’ve seen too much CCTV footage to take this one calmly. We have to understand why it happened. There’s something about our national game that’s a vehicle for thuggery, hooliganism and racism.
“I would like to see Euro Sunday as a turning point that, were we ever to win the World Cup bid, we would never see things like that again.”
At a presentation to support her independent report that was commissioned by the FA in the aftermath of the violence on July 11, images were shown of some of the 20 “life-threatening” incidents identified in and around Wembley that day.
A T-shirted boy suffering from a seizure was pulled from a stampeding crush of fans. A quick-thinking steward caught an innocent ticketholder cradling a small child as he was bundled over by drunken fans trying to force their way in through a fire exit to get in without tickets. Safety barriers were ripped up and used as makeshift trampolines, with fans threatening to throw the steel structures into the crowd until persuaded not to.
Perhaps the most ghoulish incident was a fan putting on a high-visibility jacket and kidnapping a boy in a wheelchair to get in through a disabled access.
Outside the stadium, passengers had to be locked inside a double-decker bus for their own safety while supporters clambered over the outside of the vehicle.
“I witnessed bottles and cans being thrown at people, children cowering behind parents to hide, trees being ripped up and thrown, climbing on roofs and throwing things into the crowds,” wrote one survey respondent.
Why, though?
The authorities were guilty of “collective failings” in letting this all go on unchecked and football fans up and down the country can expect a clampdown on anti-social behaviour.
Baroness Casey also demanded the FA lead a national campaign to effect a “seachange in attitudes” among supporters.