Field-forest-meadow at the Old Port
Among the followers of the English national team, there is little more organized hooligans.Nevertheless, they are still considered legitimate target - like around the game against Russia.Anatomy of a violent weekend.
From
Daniel Ryser
"It really is important that you contact your opponent in the head - otherwise he is still the same again": Russian hooligans beat a British one, Marseille, June 11th.PHOTO: CARL COURT, GETTY
Again and again in trouble with English football fans, there was a tendency to say after this weekend: The drink, provoke, then they roar any racist slogan, throwing a couple of beer bottles at police and beat up a defenseless passers.you do not know any differently.And in fact, on Youtube you can watch among other exactly: An Englishman has a fantastic last Friday in Marseille from the tear gas mist and then hits a man holding two bags in their hands, at full speed a left hook to the temple.The man collapses and remains motionless.
In the hours that followed there were further isolated scuffles between some English and French hooligans.An Englishman was beaten up by the French and thrown into the harbor.He rowed drunk with the poor, to some people pulled him from the water.The next day, the day of the match between England and Russia, it got started: Around 150 Russian hooligans attacked the Old Port of Marseille English fans, several people were seriously injured.Then stormed same hooligans at the stadium a family sector.Panic broke out.No police in sight.Who were those hooligans?Why did they go so brutally against the English?And why the English were unable or unwilling to oppose this violence something where they do have a pretty bad reputation itself?
Ghosts from the past
But that the English were overrun, is no surprise.For the days where notorious British hooligans appeared organized to play their national team, are long gone.If the usual spontaneous provocations, rowdiness and brawls subtracting that are likely to be a side effect of greater Soccer events forever, then took the last big, organized and brutal appearance English hooligans at a major tournament of 1998. - namely here in Marseille during the world Championships (which is why the local hooligans had prepared in advance).At that time, around the game between England and Tunisia, organized English Hooligans an hours-long manhunt on everything they did not seem severally or was not red hair.For some English hooligans went to jail.After riots at the Euro 2000 then was quiet.
What the English to this day, over and over again, whether in the Champions League in Rome in 2007 or 2010 at the European Championship qualifier in Switzerland, makes the seemingly legitimate goal of trophies that applies to attack it and their shame there as recently hold true with body mounted Go-Pro cameras: These are the ghosts of the past that are stuck to this day in the collective memory, ghosts, of which the media can not be solved, the police did not, but also the opposing hooligans not, like the Russians do everything when it comes against the English.There are, for example, the images of the disaster in 1985 when Liverpool hooligans in Brussels Heysel Stadium stormed the family sector and 39 people died in the stampede.In Marseille it was exactly the reverse: Russian hooligans stormed the family sector, the British fled.
This image in turn says a lot about how much one hand the British public has changed, but also on how the image of his opponent has not changed.After all, it was the English who had invented hooliganism.And the eighties in England were overshadowed by an uninhibited, extreme and often extremely racist violence that claimed not only in Heysel dead.Even the Russians were the English model, to the clothing brands which are now carried throughout the scene.In Russia, however, the hooliganism established only in the late nineties, when he was in England already on the wane.
You can see it in documentaries and in reports read about the legendary and infamous English "hooligan firms" from Millwall, Chelsea, West Ham, Manchester: The repression it has here and there was almost wiped out - even if for example the Chelsea Headhunters 2014 in a similar manner as now the Russian hooligans in Paris ahead of the Champions League quarterfinals appeared out of nowhere and hours of scuffles with hooligans from PSG delivered.Here was the Headhunters succeeded, giving them no longer possible at the games of the national team: They had traveled via Belgium to France and then disappeared from the radar of authorities.Not so with encounters of national teams, especially at world and European championships.The English were indeed why so relentlessly hunted in Marseille through the streets, because the British authorities had made unlike their French and Russian counterparts as only their job: They had spoken in advance over 2000 travel bans for hooligans and confiscated their passports, including also those of James Shayler, who had called in May to to fraternize with Russian hooligans and make in Marseille jointly hunt for Muslims.