England are sleep-walking into another hooligan crisis
The FA need to respond now — they turn a blind eye at their peril
IT FELT like being on the set of Jurassic Park in Dortmund on Wednesday night. Instead of gazing at dinosaurs brought back from extinction, we all got to stare at groups of England supporters being prehistoric. Germany fans looked on with mild curiosity, as if they were regarding a different species. Many of the rest of us turned away in shame.
There were some apologists for the idiots, of course. There always are. There were some who said it was just banter. There were some who said it was fake news, which is now the standard riposte of those who are incapable of thinking for themselves. There were some who said nobody got hurt so lighten up.
Yes, even in a city that was hit by 2,000 tons of high-explosive bombs in one RAF air raid during World War II, there were those who thought it perfectly fine that England supporters should pretend to be fighter planes during the German national anthem and sing lyrics like ‘ Have you ever seen a German win a war? Have you f***’. Where’s the harm in that, after all?
In football terms, here’s part of the answer: what we saw inside and outside Signal Iduna Park suggested that England is sleepwalking towards another hooligan crisis at next year’s World Cup in Russia. That there was no violence in Dortmund was a result of the fact that Germany fans chose not to respond to the provocation. IF England supporters are stupid enough to behave the same way when they get to Moscow or St Petersburg next year — if we qualify — then the outcome will be very different. There will be no shortage of paramilitary-style fans and security forces willing to take our hooligans on. And that will not end well, either for the team or the supporters.
Sure, it’s only a minority of England fans who do the damage. It was ever thus. There will be no problems at England’s qualifier against Lithuania at Wembley today and most travelling England supporters are decent, loyal supporters who love the game and despair of the actions of the few.
But it was a sizeable minority who were singing about 10 German bombers. You only need to listen to the television soundtrack to appreciate that. So let’s not pretend otherwise.
The FA ignored it at first. They’re getting good at that. They did it in San Marino in March 2013 when a few England fans sang about burning Rio and Anton Ferdinand on a bonfire. The FA could not find any evidence of the song being sung, despite eyewitness evidence to the contrary. Funny that. Many hooligans felt empowered by their inaction.
It was similar on Wednesday night. That’s what happens when you turn a blind eye. Gareth Southgate, the England manager, is a bright man who wants to give the national team a fresh start on the pitch but he was not willing to condemn the actions of neanderthal fans who defiled t he German anthem and goaded German supporters by singing about wars that killed millions. It was an opportunity missed.
FA chairman Greg Clarke, to his credit, has since described the actions of England supporters in Dortmund as ‘ disrespectful and inappropriate’ but the truth is that complacency set in among the authorities some time ago. They started to look the other way and hooliganism is returning.
After the hooligan horrors of the Eighties, Nineties and Euro 2000, the success of banning orders and geographical good fortune meant that Japan and South Korea 2002, Germany 2006, South Africa 2010 and Brazil 2014 were relatively trouble-free. The England fans who did travel were fine ambassadors for their country.
But it is obvious that things have changed and even though it is still the case that the majority of England fans are normal, decent, loyal fans, it is important to address the fact that among England’s travelling support is a rump of disaffected, young white working-class men who are not interested in winning friends and do not appear to be much interested in watching football matches either.
The England football team have been a rallying point for those who feel disenfranchised before and it would be foolish to assume the geo-political shifts that are causing concern throughout so much of Europe and North America would leave it untouched.
It is this voice that was heard prominently in the Brexit campaign and the election of Donald Trump as US President and, in its manifestation among England’s support, it searches for glory among the events of the past in places that seem improbable to many who lived through them. The Troubles in Northern Ireland are just a memory now, thankfully, but not to those England supporters who still insist on inserting ‘No Surrender’ into the words of our national anthem when it is sung before a match.
One supporter told me on Wednesday night that some of England’s younger fans in Dortmund had greeted the death of Martin McGuinness with great glee even though they had not lived through the time when the IRA was planting bombs on the British mainland. SOME of these so- called fans are stuck in a timewarp, eager to return to an England they never knew because they think there is nothing for them in the England they know now. So they sing songs about World Wars and the fight against Irish republicanism and try to turn back the clock.
The worry for the FA, if they attempt anything more than gesture politics, is that this group of fans will see the displeasure of the authorities as vindication for their actions. Their condemnation by the media means nothing to them, save being a badge of honour.
A few hours before they spewed out their bile in Dortmund, a terrorist attacked Londoners at random and killed a British policeman, an American tourist, a mum with Spanish heritage who was going to pick her kids up from school and a retired window-cleaner from south London. The injured came from 12 different nations.
In its own way, the list of those who lost their lives and the injured was a symbol of the wonderful multi-cultural city that London has become but the England supporters in Dortmund paid that tragedy no heed. They were t oo busy singing about foreign battlefields long, long ago.