British soccer fans have history of going berserk

Press, 31 May 1985, Page 6

British soccer fans have history of going berserk

By

BRIAN CATHCART,

of

Reuter (through NZPA) London

Soccer violence of the kind that claimed more than 40 lives in Brussels yesterday has been seen from Argentina to Poland and from Mali to China, but no country is more closely linked with it than Britain.

For 13 years British fans, frequently troublesome at home, have been taking their worst violence abroad and have defied all the remedies that governments and sports officials have devised.

In 1972 Glasgow Rangers’ soccer fans rioted in Barcelona. Since then British fans have rampaged across the stands or through the streets of Barcelona, Rotterdam, Paris, Turin, Madrid, Basle, Oslo, Amsterdam, Luxemburg, and Lisbon. Millions of dollars in damage has been done and, before yesterday, a handful of people had been killed. Clubs have been fined, forced to replay matches, and even temporarily barred from European competition, but the chain of trouble has never been broken.

In Britain the picture has been no different. Only two months ago, the Prime Minister, Mrs Margaret

Thatcher, stepped in after a riot at a soccer game left 40 injured.

Mrs Thatcher established a high-level Ministerial committee, which proposed a ban on the sale of alcohol at stadiums and a ruling that steel fences should separate rival supporters from each other and from the pitch. She called British soccer administrators in for some tough talking, but afterwards no-one suggested that the problem had been solved.

British soccer games are heavily policed. At clubs such as Leeds and Chelsea — with a bad record for crowd violence — supporters are chaperoned by hundreds of officers, some mounted, others with dogs. But the riots still happen. Before yesterday, Britain had seen three serious incidents in three months. On March 5 48 were injured in a riot at a match between Chelsea and Sunderland. On March 13 fans ran amuck when Millwall played Luton. On May 12, the day 53 died in a fire at Bradford City soccer stadium, a youth died after a riot after a match between Birmingham City and Leeds.

Two former England captains have advocated drastic steps to counter the

problem. Bobby Charlton wants the Government to reintroduce conscription for young men, which Britain abolished in the 19505, as a way of tackling hooliganism. A former Liverpool star, Emlyn Hughes, has suggested issuing identity cards to regular fans, who could be stripped of them and barred from matches if they were in trouble. Neither idea has found favour with the authorities. European sporting authorities have been equally unsuccessful in their efforts to contain “the English disease.” Unfamiliar with the problem, or ill-equipped to handle it, European stadiums have been seen by troublesome fans as easy targets for violence. In Basle in 1981, when 16 were injured and 59 arrested after Switzerland beat England, only 40 police officers were initially assigned to crowd control, a fraction of the number at a routine English game. After that match English Football Association chiefs said that they would back any move to ban English fans from foreign matches outright.

Many see such a move as unrealistic, pointing out the difficulty of barring fans from travelling or buying

tickets. Another idea suggested then was that fans with a record of trouble should forfeit their passports, which would require changing the law. That, too, posed problems in view of the increasing ease of travel between European Economic Community countries. Other remedies have been tried. In 1972 Glasgow Rangers were barred from European competition for two years after the Barcelona riot. In 1975 Leeds United was banned for four years after fans rampaged througli Paris. Two years ago, Luxemburg proclaimed that it w’ould never again be host to a match with an English team after the country had its second British soccer riot in two years. Ironically, the years of violence have coincided with years of unparallelled success for British clubs, which before yesterday had won the European Champions’ Cup for seven of the last eight seasons. Commentators speculated that yesterday’s appearance by Liverpool in the European Cup final could be the last by an English club in Europe for many years, because of the possibility of a ban on the country’s sides.