Our hooligans won’t run amok in Russia.. they’re too busy running scared
IT wasn’t a great time to be following England abroad at the turn of the century.
The 1998 World Cup was summed up by the despicable scenes in Marseille, when hundreds of England supporters clashed with locals and riot police, hurling bottles, smashing shop windows and overturning cars.
It was worse at Euro 2000 as water cannons and tear gas were turned on drunken England fans laying siege to Charleroi, with 350 arrested and 200 deported.
For an embarrassed nation it provoked another bout of naval-gazing, for those like me reporting on these tournaments it made you want to take a summer job working on the Blackpool dodgems.
Then the 2002 World Cup came along and peace and love broke out in Japan as the majority of England fans acted like normal human beings. Among the 8,000 travelling a mere 13 were arrested, only one of which was for a public-order offence. Which over a month was astonishing.
So what hap- pened? Hooligan- ism hadn’t gone out of fashion.
Indeed, in that year the number of fans barred from games in England rose from 687 to 1,150.
Banning orders kept plenty off the planes as did the cost of travelling 6,000 miles.
But something else put off those veterans of Marseille and Charleroi – the welcoming party.
In response to fears that Japan was facing a barbarian invasion, the authorities
They are just wimps hiding behind safety in numbers
prepared for one. They staged battle rehearsals involving thousands of martial arts-trained police, dressed as RoboCop, wielding the celebrated ‘net gun’ able to restrain seven hooligans at once. Britain’s Foreign Office warned fans the rules had changed and anyone arrested for even minor offences would be held for up to 27 days without charge.
And, if convicted, they faced long sentences including hard labour.
The threats and the coverage they received did the trick. Our brave boys bricked it. Which isn’t surprising when you realise they’re wimps hiding behind safety in numbers.
Take Amsterdam on Friday. How hard do you have to be to take over a bridge, soak middle-aged tourists with beer and sling a bike into a canal?
What reserves of courage does it take to line up with hundreds of others, aggressively chanting at locals about the Nazis who once occupied their city? How brave to throw bottles at riot police from the back of a crowd?
Anyone who has seen them close-up knows they are mostly sad individuals, who mistake a moronic cowardice for patriotism. They’re cringeworthy boors who glory in past wars, but would run a mile if they faced real combat.
Which was why they bottled out of going to Japan and why, despite a resurgence in their hardcore numbers, it looks like they’re bottling out of this World Cup.
Ticket requests from England for first-phase games in Russia (which closed months before the latest diplomatic row with Moscow) are down 75 per cent on the last World Cup in Brazil.
There were only 24,125 applications from England compared with 338,414 from Germany. We’re not in the top-10 countries asking to be there, which informed sources say has a lot to do with the savage beating many trouble-makers took from Russian Ultras two years ago in France.
Clearly the fear of having no hiding place lessens the desire to get tanked up in Moscow squares singing: “If it wasn’t for the English you’d be Krauts.”
So don’t look at those Amsterdam scenes and despair. Look at those ticket sales and rejoice that Russia, like Japan, could be a World Cup that doesn’t end in national humiliation.
Well, off the pitch at least.