Binge-drinking thugs who kick off rather than see kick-off

Independent, The (London), Aug 5, 2006 by CHRIS MAUME

"Nothing is true. Everything is permitted." These were the last words, apparently, of Hassan i Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain - who apart from being top dog in the Assassins sect was, I suspect, an England fan.

"Nothing is true" - at least not if you watched Panorama: Hooligans (BBC1, Wednesday) in which two contradictory propositions clashed. And "Everything is permitted" - if you're a binge- drinking, chair-chucking, moron.

The two contradictory propositions were: a) the 2006 World Cup was an historical turning point for England's travelling support, hitherto a national disgrace but now rivalling the Tartan Army for lovable revelry. Or: b) England used to be supported by thugs. They're still supported by thugs.

Watching it on the box back home, a) seemed to tell the real tale, and the film's voice-over promise that it would tell "the untold story of the ugly face of the beautiful game" seemed ludicrously overheated. Uncomfortably for my thesis, however, the evidence was highly selective but admittedly compelling: in Frankfurt, on the day of England's first game, the national anthem belted out by a knot of bare-chested, beer-swilling louts with rubbish tattoos and inflatable Spitfires' their endearing declarations that they would rather be a Paki than a Kraut' that sweet childhood counting game, "Ten German Bombers"' and as a little bonus, "My granddad killed your granddad" to the tune of "Yankee Doodle Dandy".

There was more, after the Frankfurt game the Angles assembled in and around the Karaoke Disco - an Irish theme pub, improbably - hoping for a ruck with the Saxons. While they waited for it to kick off, they whiled away their time swapping pleasantries like: "The one thing I want to do in life is slice a Muslim's head off."

There were also opportunities for fraternisation in a series of impromptu meet-and-greets. During one of them, a Lincoln fan glassed a lad from Leeds, who was most offended.

"I wouldn't mind if a fucking Greek or Paki had done it," he said, staunching the flow of blood with his rolled-up T-shirt. His colleagues were similarly scandalised at this breach in protocol. "Bang out of order that is," one said. "You come out of here and one of your own does that to you..."

I kept telling myself that there were more than 300,000 England fans over there, so the occasional bit of handbags was statistically insignificant. But Dave Lewis, head spotter for the British police, who could find employment as a Daily Mail leader writer, had a more apocalyptic take as he carried the film's central message. Football's war on terror has been won, and hardcore hooliganism banished to the lunatic fringes, but we're still exporting violence. "The next step," he says, "is the antisocial louts who refuse to take any cognisance of laws and authority, drink to excess - generally people you wouldn't want to live next door to you. If they start to associate themselves with football as they do with the night-time economy across the UK, then I think we've got real problems."

An erstwhile hooligan, Andy Nicholls, had a modest proposal (though unlike Dean Swift's, his was serious).

"To stamp out hooliganism once and for all," he said, "you'd have to get every man between 14 and 40 and chop off their arms and legs." Get John Reid on to it, I say.