This will be my first blog on a political theme, on a current affair, if you will.
During the week, English football fans should have enjoyed a major midweek League Cup interlude, a welcome opportunity to rotate squads and partake in knock-out action in a competition that on average yields a greater goals-per-game ratio than any other. Instead, we contended with the gritty reality of a menace that stalks not only the beautiful game in this country, but ultimately exists as a societal ill as well.
In the 1970's and 1980's, football hooliganism was rife. Matches were regularly interrupted by fighting on the terraces, spilling onto the pitches, as so-called fans took local, regional and occasionally national grievances to the sporting arena. Hooliganism is nothing new, but it reared its ugly head on Tuesday evening in East London, as West Ham United took on bitter rivals Millwall at Upton Park. Even those who know little about football will, I am sure, be aware of the history of this fixture, and indeed the reputations of a certain minority of supporters of both teams.
Their first match-up since 2005, for some this was a game less about progression to the next round, and more about local bragging rights, a throw-back to those earlier decades when football took second seat to the ignorance of generally over-angered, under-worked, boozed-up louts, whose anger-management problems no doubt stemmed (and still do) from a multitude of socio-political problems in towns and cities across the UK, left fermenting until a spark, a boiling-point, a confrontation.
The authorities in the United Kingdom, particularly in England, have done a generally good job in the past fifteen years curbing some of the yobbish excesses of our national sport, to the extent that we now stand as an example for the rest of Europe of how to tackle the problem. But this is more prevention than cure, and the talk from West Ham, Millwall, and the FA this week strikes me, as it did Henry Winter in The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, as being criminally naive and underwhelming. Lifetime bans are all well and good, but less effective when hooligans openly brag on internet forums about breaching prior travel restrictions and banning orders in order to fight outside the ground. That's before we even come on to the trouble inside the turnstiles.
Lifetime bans are needed, of-course. Yet an opportunity exists here to go further, to open up the justice system to come down hard on those who seek to destroy one of the last remaining cultural phenomenons of our nation. Football has, in many ways, become a national religion. It certainly is already a major business industry, and it seems to me that in no other industry would such behaviour be met with such a wimp response. Banking reform followed the credit crunch (or will follow it, eventually). Why is there no talk of custodial reform following the discredit crunch in the East End? Banking firms are being taxed and investigated. Why is The Firm not being arrested and handed over to the full might of the English legal system? Bans are short-term fixes, like sticking a plaster on an arm that bleeds from more than one cut. The yobs, the louts, the huddled masses of idiocy, need to not just be prevented from visiting certain geographic locations at set times, or barred from buying tickets to matches and entering stadiums. They need to be fined and, in the most severe ringleading cases, imprisoned.
CCTV footage, coupled with information from the ISPs hosting sites where the hooligan's dastardly deeds are planned in advance, can help pinpoint specific individuals at the heart of the troubles. Start with them, make an example, and send out a message. With a World Cup bid on the horizon for the 2018 competition, we cannot afford leniency.
Nor is this simply a question of boosting our bid chances, or keeping investors in English football. There is, undoubtedly, a moral imperative to make sure hooligans are suitable charged and punished. I adore going to football. Playing it, watching it, talking it - it's a passion of mine and I am proud to be a fan of Tottenham Hotspur, the England national side, and competitive football in this country in general. I travel across the nation watching and playing in matches, pay my TV subscriptions in order to watch all the televised action, sing my team's songs and learn the statistics of fanhood. I am a decent, law-abiding citizen. Hell, I'm a decent, law-abiding lawyer. There are millions more like me. (Well, maybe not millions of lawyers, but millions of decent football fans anyway.) Every weekend, families go to support their local side, Dads taking young children to see their team, their family history and local community. What a shame that on Tuesday night in East London, at a football club so steeped in wonderful traditions, such an alarming level of sheer, puerile, pathetic, menace could subsist.
West Ham United, and I say this as a Spurs fan, are a fantastic football club. They try, and always have done, to play football the right way. This is the home of the Academy Of Football, the playground of World Cup legends like Geoff Hurst and Bobby Moore, of class acts like Trevor Brooking and Teddy Sheringham, of genuinely impressive modern-day role-models like Jack Collison, who not only played in the Millwall game just 48-hours after his Dad was killed in a motorcycle accident on his way to see his son against Spurs on Sunday, but who also took a leading role in imploring supporters to leave the playing area after the pitch invasions and return to their seats. The vast majority of Hammers fans, and Millwall fans for that matter, attended the game looking forward to an exciting cup match under the Bolyen Ground floodlights.
However, as well as a need to deal with the offenders through the English legal system, questions must be put to those in an organisational capacity at Upton Park. Why were there not enough stewards? And why did those who were stewarding seem so poorly trained and equipped to deal with the problem? Why did West Ham refuse to pay for more police officers (all clubs pay for a police presence)? At the West Ham v Spurs game last Sunday, I felt the stewarding of the away supporters section was inadequate. I go to West Ham v Spurs every year, and in the past have been impressed with how we have been managed. In 2007, after the outrageously amazing 4-3 win for Spurs, the police presence was stepped up almost out of nowhere. Subtle it was not, but it got the message home to anybody thinking about causing trouble, and thus this most angering of matches for a Hammers fan passed without criminal incident. On Sunday, however, I felt there were not enough stewards or police around. Spurs fans pushed forwards, out of their seats, as the game wore on, with no response from the men in fluorescent jackets facing us. Once upon a tragic time this could have spelt serious disaster, but the fences in football have gone now. When I heard about, and then watched, what happened just two days later, I cannot say I was overly surprised.
Now is the time for the police to step in and send a clear message. Arrest people, don't just ban them. Demonstrate that hooliganism is a hallmark of the late twentieth century, not the twenty-first. Help the families who want to go to football matches free from the fear of violence.
The psychology of hooliganism also deserves attention. As President Bartlet says in The West Wing: "They weren't born wanting to do this." Loutish yobs, high on drink, low on ambition, operate in gangs in similar ways to city estates are run and defended. Ultimately, poor education and high unemployment in major urban areas contribute. People need hope: something to strive for, to work for, to become. A lack of this for so many, practically from birth, does not excuse their actions, but can help us understand the endemic nature of the mob mentality.
Urban regeneration, investment in schools, better workfare projects: these civic schemes should be coupled with actual prosecutions of current offenders, so that the next generation of football fan will never be part of, and will never have to watch, scenes like those on Queen's Street, Green Street, and inside the Boleyn, ever again.
People need something to fight for. Otherwise they just fight.
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