Tear-gassing A-listers has exposed all the Paris lies
IF there is one positive about events outside the Stade de France on Saturday night, it is that the police teargassed and terrorised all the right people.
Sir Kenny Dalglish’s daughter; the hero of the 1981 European Cup final; Joel Matip’s brother; Gary Lineker; the director of the women’s game for the Football Association; Thiago Alcantara’s partner; the Golf Correspondent of the Daily Mail; the family of Jason McAteer.
not that they deserved it. nobody deserved it. But the fact that they got it means thousands of ordinary supporters, who might otherwise not be believed, will now be heard.
Because we know that Kelly Cates isn’t a hooligan, and neither is 67-year-old Alan Kennedy, or Marvin Matip, or Kelly Simmons, or Julia Vigas, or Derek Lawrenson and his son, Conor, or Mrs McAteer.
So if they were caught up in the chaos outside the stadium, it exposes the lies that were told by UEFA, the police and the French state to cover their own ineptitude on the night.
If it happened to them, it most certainly happened to the others, the ones who usually have no voice and find it hard to get their stories heard.
For imagine if it was just regular fans who had been treated this way? Who would be their advocates? It only takes a 10-second clip of a few lads scaling a fence — and we don’t even know they were Liverpool supporters, there were quite a few strapping young locals occupying the stairwells in the Liverpool end, by all accounts — for scepticism to take hold.
Look at the Real Madrid fans, they didn’t seem to have problems. It’s that lot again. Always the victims, it’s never your fault.
Yet Real Madrid were treated differently. A French friend told me a week before the match that Paris was already on edge about the arrival of Liverpool; that Madrid’s fan park was more central, whereas Liverpool’s was out to the barren east of the city, near the end of the line.
At the conclusion of the match, while stewards stood in front of the Madrid end, riot police faced the Liverpool fans, part of a fictitious narrative that they were trouble-makers and violence could erupt at any second.
It was all part of the cover-up, the implication that Liverpool fans had misbehaved.
GATHERInG confrontationally as they did was damage limitation on the part of the French police, who will have sensed the growing feelings of outrage around their handling of the match.
Yet there was no problem, no situation requiring control. When the final whistle blew, most of the fans simply turned to leave, as fans do when their team have lost a final. There was no appetite for hostility.
The riot police stood there, irrelevant and unnecessary, keeping Paris safe from the handful of Liverpool supporters who remained to salute their team and watch the trophy presentation. Most just wanted to go home.
Yesterday, the reputational clean-up began. Gerald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, said fake tickets were circulating on ‘an industrial scale’ and between 30,000 and 40,000 Liverpool fans arrived with forgeries or with no tickets at all.
Equally, friends of Andrew Robertson, the Liverpool left back were told their tickets were fake — even though they were supplied by him, through the club.
So let’s just say we should stay healthily sceptical about the authorities and their ability to spot fakes. Are Robertson’s tickets included in the alleged forgeries? Tickets that we know for certain were real.
Darmanin said 62,000 Liverpool fans travelled to the Stade de France, despite an allocation of 19,618 tickets, and that 70 per cent of tickets presented were fake. Really?
How do they know this? Because these seem quite specific numbers and percentages, whereas
what we saw at Gate Y and elsewhere suggests chaos during which strict record-keeping probably took something of a hit.
The excuses were coming thick and fast. It was also argued that the Stade de France had a threemonth lead time for an event that would normally be planned over a year.
But why would a national stadium require 12 months of preparation to police a football match? The Stade de France has held the World Cup final, the European Championship final, and this was its third Champions League final. There are blueprints for how big events work.
And three months is hardly a rush. Baseball’s World Series is organised sometimes with as little as 48 hours’ notice. Nobody was demanding that of Paris.
Yet, still, they might have got away with this blistering incompetence it if it wasn’t for the indiscriminate nature of those on the receiving end.
If it wasn’t for the fact that these dangerous clowns were so incompetent, they managed to drag Lineker into the mayhem, they claimed club tickets were fakes and pepper-sprayed players’ wives and families.
And it is a pity that this is what needs to happen for ordinary fans to be believed. But fans have known UEFA’s flaws for years. When Kelly Cates calls them ‘lying b ******* ’ on Twitter, however, it means something might at last get done.