Hooligansm?

When France pitched its glossily framed bid for this

championship tournament the campaign slogan plastered
across the posters and plinths was Le Foot comme on
laime!. Football how you like it is a suitably sunny and
inane Big Sport tagline, not to mention for anyone trying
to escape the wild, barking disintegration of Marseille city
centre on Saturday night a source of some rather bitter
laughter in the dark. On ne laime pas en effet; On ne
laime pas du tout.
Last week Michel Platini, for whom the next few weeks
were intended as a kind of coronation, announced his
intention to remain grandly absent from the matches. He
might just have a point. Bolt the doors, Michel. Judging by
the evidence not just of Marseille but also the jumpy,
stretched periphery of the opening game in Paris, it could
be a long old four weeks.
Certainly the past three days have provided a genuinely
grim start in the south. The weather has turned in the
north, with rain falling in Paris, which still seems a little
un-gripped by football mania. Une Ombre sur Marseille,
a shadow on Marseille, was the morning headline in La
Provence. And the clouds of Marseille will now linger as
Uefa opens disciplinary proceedings, future schedules are
checked, shivers of apprehension gulped back.

If we cast all football fans as thugs, only the

hooligans win
Zoe Williams

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Marseille was a frantic, wild place in the wee hours of

Sunday morning, with thousands of frightened fans and
tourists wandering through a city that appeared to have
given up on them. It seems a fair bet the 8th circle of
hell, the one Dante considered vaguely but gave up on as
a little too banal and pointless, has a section where you
get to trudge through glass and vomit at 1.30am past
bolted Mtro stations, while weeping children in replica
shirts stumble about with their frightened parents looking
for nonexistent transport, peering down side streets,
plotting escape routes from the sudden spurts and burps
of violence that flared again through the night.
The Mtro was running, but not the stop near the stadium,
and without any guidance on where to join it. Taxi drivers
had understandably vanished. No buses ran, or at least
none were to be seen. Sirens blared past the gaggles of
temporarily dispossessed, heading for the violence in the
port area.
Several British citizens are still in hospital. Social media
pictures have flashed around of one man being kicked
repeatedly in the head as he lay on the floor. Police had to
resuscitate an unconscious 51-year-old man who

witnesses suggested had been attacked with a small axe.

Wandering through in the afternoon, it seemed bizarre a
football match, of all things, complete with saccharine
corporate staging, scrolled with adverts for financial
services and beer and computer games, was about to
actually take place.
What to make of this? Some will say you reap what you
sow and take a quietly censorious satisfaction in the
spectacle of that tiny minority of England fans who enjoy
intimidating the locals feeling a prickle at the back of their
necks. Here Englands own regulars met an even more
furious force in Russias massed and vicious hooligan
gangs.
This, though, is to miss the point completely. It is quite
clear a group of violent Russian men came to Marseille
with the idea of attacking English people. A few English
people were already acting boorishly and violently. Local
gangs enjoyed prodding the hive and taking a penance on
their own streets. But all of these factions are a small, toxic
minority, from whom local citizens and thousands of
peaceable visitors need proper protection, just as they do
from pickpockets, muggers and criminals of all types.
This is where the city, the police, Uefa and the stadium
management failed miserably. Uefa has announced it will
now probe the violence inside the stadium. First stop: its
wretchedly negligent lack of segregation between the two
main groups of fans. Russia fans didnt clamber across
into the England section. They just ran through an empty
space. These were two solid, packed-out opposing

sections. Before kick-off jaws dropped well, this jaw

anyway at the sight of nothing but a walkway between
them. Violence seemed inevitable.