Hands Up All Those Who Were Surprised

I've only been frightened at a football match or in connection with a football match three times, the first time was back in 1972 when West Ham played Arsenal and I saw somebody get 'bottled' a few yards in front of me at Upton Park. The second time was in 1990 when the fixture computer at the Football League managed to arrange for Leeds United to visit Bournemouth on a Bank Holiday weekend and the Yorkshire club's supporters inflicted four days of mayhem on a busy seaside town, I was standing with the ITV camera crew that were intimidated and then attacked before the hooligans managed to switch their attention to the arrival of the Wiltshire police mounted division. No, I haven't got my geography confused in my old age, back in the day Dorset couldn't afford any police horses and so they were horseboxed in from Salisbury and beyond!

The third time of feeling genuinely scared was when West Ham played Millwall at home back in the mid nineties. One of my old cars had a West Ham sticker in the rear window and whilst travelling across Tower Bridge and around the one way system at Tower Hill I realised that two lads in a Ford Escort were following us. Laughing and drinking lager (including the driver) they were both wearing Millwall shirts and I could see from the view in my mirror that they had spotted the Boleyn Ground sticker. Having gone round the Aldgate one way I decided to see if they really were looking for trouble by driving up Mile End Road rather than down East India Dock Road towards Canning Town. They followed me. They stayed behind me over the Bow flyover and on towards Stratford. It was still plausible that they were going to the match, a Sunday morning kick off by the way, so I decided to see if they would follow me all the way round Stratford's one way system - they did. I was starting to panic a little bit now because what had seemed like coincidence now seemed a bit more serious. I drove into a housing estate and they followed, the road narrowed due to a combination of speed bumps and traffic calming and it felt like we were in a car chase from the Sweeney! We were miles from anywhere that had a tube connection with Upton Park and there seemed to be no need for these two to be following me other than causing trouble. I took another couple of what I hoped would be diversionary turns and they stopped at the top of one of the roads behind me and then drove off.

The policing for that Sunday match was greater than anything I have witnessed before or since: Upton Park (the district not the ground) looked like Fort Apache The Bronx. Police in riot gear, barriers, helicopters overhead, police on horses, police watching from second floor windows with video cameras - for years supporters waiting in the queue at Upton Park station have been filmed by police from windows above the shops opposite the station entrance. Fans were cordoned off from the rest of East London life and funnelled down Green Street to the ground. As a result of this there wasn't any trouble, the atmosphere in the ground was great, the football pretty ordinary but everybody got home in one piece.

Fast forward to last Tuesday and you wonder whether the last few years have left the police lacking in some sort of intelligence when it comes to crowd control - G20 and the deaths of innocent people notwithstanding. Now that's not in anyway a suggesting that I condone the level of violence that took place on Tuesday night, I don't. It was unnecessary, premeditated and nasty and has no place in an English town let alone in or around a football ground. The point is that everybody knew it was going to happen.

Messageboards prior to the game were full of the usual macho posturing. Millwall fans had already decided that they would 'dedicate' two songs to Callum Davenport and Jack Collison - again I have to say a section of West Ham fans are equally disgusting given their treatment last Sunday of Jermain Defoe and last season Cristiano Ronaldo, but revelling in the stabbing of one player and the death of another players father is not the way to impress your hosts. When the draw had been made for this round of the cup their had been a collective intake of breath, two sides whose fans have a well known dislike for each other meeting at night for the first time in thirty seven years, trouble? What trouble?

Looking at the television pictures on the night, and those subsequently available online the one thing that struck me (no pun intended) was how many of the 'supporters' were of my age or similar. It was like watching the ICF of old come back to haunt you, only this time there seemed to be a distinct lack of 'Under-5's' - the 'youth firm' of junior thugs that used to follow the older guys around. The other thing of course was how easy it is nowadays to identify the troublemakers, in the past there has been a sense of what I can only describe as 'typical East End loyalty' when it came to anybody stepping outside of the law, the 'not me guv', 'he's a lovable rogue' mentality all too prevalent. CCTV however and the pictures from SKY and those online paint a very different picture all together and what, in the name of Sir Trevor Brooking, was that prat doing with his four year old son on his shoulders doing, giving the boy a better view of the trouble?

West Ham have survived the calls from certain quarters to be thrown out of the competition and go to Notlob in the next round. There will be the usual small fine, the hand wringing and the promises to do the right thing in the future. The fighting won't stop of course, that will take place on a brownfield site between a handful of hooligans determined to keep the hatred going and to uphold the honour - whatever that means, there will be no police, no CCTV and no news reports, like the tree that falls in the forest nobody except those present will even know its happened.