We’re doing the meerkat dance again – have you noticed?
The one where no matter what’s occurring down on the pitch we’re all on tiptoes, peering in the opposite direction, neck craned at a spark of something cracking off.
Football violence never goes away. Like knife crime, gang warfare and prostitution, it just moves on. If you press down on one end of a partially-inflated balloon, the air just goes somewhere else...before it creeps back when you relax the pressure.
As Jasper Carrot once said at the height of his funky moped routine in ’79: “Football violence really is just symptomatic of a deeper malaise in society . . . . I don’t know what it means either but I’ve been reading the Guardian again and I thought it sounded good.”
Fear not, I’m not about to announce the return of hooliganism. That’s a bandwagon which has rolled on and on for the last decade despite arrests remaining largely static for violent and non-violent disorder. But personally, I have sensed recently that things are beginning to change for the worse leaving a tinder-dry supporters’ landscape ripe for a forest fire.
I wanted to remember the Utd v Wednesday derby match at Bramall Lane recently for the excitement of a five-goal thriller which we edged. It was indeed a cracking atmosphere but it was also a drug and alcohol-fuelled fest coming as it did on the back of a Friday during which many fans had indulged. A Friday night kick-off to satisfy TV demands is an example of what I’m talking about. The bars inside the ground on the lower levels of the Kop were a cess pit of drink, drugs, spewing and minor scuffles, the atmos before during and after was markedly more edgily violent than in previous years. Ticketing policies at the game last year led to Wednesday supporters getting into ‘home’ sections of the ground. At least two fights were thought serious enough for riot police to wield batons and wade into the crowd. People were ejected but of course, there were only a handful of arrests so the stats don’t look so bad the morning after.
The trouble with any piece of writing which even hints at the return of football violence is that it’s easy to slip on the banana skin of tabloid stereotypes which in turn provoke a similarly stereotypical reaction from national supporters groups. The redtop papers’ reporting of the West Ham/Millwall clash (“The Battle of Upton Park”) and now another Carling Cup tiff at Oakwell (“Oakwell rampage”) frequently make these incidents sound like English civil war skirmishes. Rabid reporting helps no-one and seeks only to herald the premature arrival of something “evil” for the specific end of selling more newspapers.
As a journalist I’ve dished out enough cyclical news stories to last a lifetime – phew what a scorcher, hotter than the Caribbean, worse than Siberia, have-a-go-heroes tackling masked raiders – to recognise that the football yob story is a staple favourite and provides acres of spicy copy especially when set against a wider historical backdrop of European and international violence, arrests and deaths. But the media is not the enemy, indeed it has played a major part in football’s success story, and the game has plenty of other knockers just waiting to take it down a peg or two.
So we should jerk back the leash of the mouth-frothing news hound because, just as a few bin bags left on the street and some late mail doesn’t really constitute a Winter of Discontent, so the occasional flare up doesn’t make a riot, certainly not relative to the number of matches taking place week-in week-out. Despite what the media says, football hooliganism – itself a media term – is not back with a vengeance. It’s dangerous to shove every public disorder act under the banner of football hooliganism. What irks national supporters groups is that the level of violence seen routinely in or around football matches is little different to those public order offences in any large city centre any Saturday night.
But like I said, the landscape’s changing and we leave ourselves vulnerable if we don’t recognise that. The fact is that previous incidents this season at Cardiff, Carlisle and Leeds (also Carling Cup – “Is the competition a magnet for hooliganism” says The Times) are adding to a fattening portfolio which any journo worth his/her salt can’t ignore for too much longer. Bystanders stabbed after being separated from their families, catering staff cowering in the corner while rioters storm the burger bar, snarling police dogs and riot police with batons – these incidents are impossible to ignore or pass off as insignificant – read Carling’s own statement after Barnsley and sense the sponsor squirm uncomfortably.
While football enjoys its unrivalled position as the premier sport on a national and international stage the ad men will pay big sponsorship bucks but just as the economy took a nosedive which few can honestly say they saw coming, so too will football’s bubble burst. Who among us can fail to see glaring similarities in the causes of the banking crisis and the management of football – over-inflated egos, earnings and bonuses disproportionate to achievement , breathtaking risk taking, overly ambitious financial management, failure of regulation, spurious international ownership, a lack of transparency– and above all, the frightening belief that the good times will never end.
Like nationalism, violence needs the fuel of discontent, economic poverty and perceived injustice to elevate scuffles into riots. And with the gap widening between the average player and his public in a sustained period of cutbacks in public service spending and increased unemployment, the forest fire, in my opinion, is just a discarded matchstick away. Management of football up to and through next year’s World Cup will be critical. Heavy handed treatment – it’s not that big a leap from putting grilles across the catering outlet to protect the staff, to sticking up fences at the side of the pitch – risks great alienation and worse behaviour. But someone needs to keep taking the temperature on the terraces.
I tell myself we’ve learned so much from the past that football will not have to be subjected ever again to such draconian measures as terrace fences, that football will not be kicked around by politicians as a scapegoat for society’s ills. I hear all the right messages from all the right people but what I hear and what I see are entirely different. I’m not deliberately being alarmist or sensational but I know what I’ve seen and I’m concerned at the feint whiff of something which smells horribly familiar – simples.
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