THE PRESS SATURDAY, JUNE 1, 1985. A focus for hooliganism

Press, 1 June 1985, Page 18

THE PRESS SATURDAY, JUNE 1, 1985. A focus for hooliganism

Hooligans, people, Britons — not soccer fans, not Liverpool supporters — brought still more shame and more dishonour to Britain in the horrific riot before the European Champions’ Cup final at Heysel Stadium, Brussels, on Wednesday. People armed with bottles and bludgeons who fought the outnumbered Belgian police in the streets of Brussels, robbed a jeweller’s shop, and terrified residents cannot fairly be called supporters of the Liverpool team, even if they were the colours of Liverpool. Liverpool does not want them.

Many of Britain’s football clubs, like soccer in general, are cursed with hooliganism that has reached a new and disastrous ferocity. British soccer is not alone in being the focus for mob violence; it has, however, become the most conspicuous and worst-beset victim. For this reason, other countries are no longer pleased to be the hosts of British teams. For years, foreign excursions by British teams have been the occasions for rampage, but hardly by those who could call themselves “supporters” of the game or a club.

Complaining about the inadequate arrangements to cage a football crowd, about the insufficiency of police control or the excess of it after the event, or about the weakness of structures that were built for sport, not a battle, is really beside the main point. Pursuing this line is accepting that holding a soccer match — or a similar event, perhaps a pop music concert, that can attract violence — is the same thing as setting the scene for a riot.

The success of such an event would only be measured by the sufficiency of measures to prevent death and injury. Keeping out the hooligans, or efforts to suppress their violence when they are in a football ground, will not stop their violence. It may stop soccer. Already it seems plain that it is going to stop British teams from playing in Europe. In Britain, as in many other countries, soccer is a game that has the interest of a mass of people whose social and economic class includes those who get the rough end of life. The connection has been a long one; yet it is only in recent years that a handful of people among the millions who follow the game have begun to treat the football occasion as one on which to shed civilised restraints, to let fly with their sense of viciousness, resentment, or a simple desire to be violent, to excite violence or to confront authority.

For millions, the soccer match has been the ritual event of the week for distraction from the ordinary things of life, and a meeting place for satisfying excitement. In recent years, the hooligan handful have treated the game as the obvious, handy opportunity to use for their own excessive ends. The politicians and others who worry about this problem must ask themselves not so much about fences and methods of crowd control as about why these people are so devoid of standards of concern for themselves and others and must go on the rampage with such awful results. If their focus is not soccer it will be found elsewhere, as it has been in other communities.