England’s thugs and losers

The Portuguese police are donning their riot gear, the café owners are boarding up their premises and the locals are telling each other, ‘Don’t go down to the square, the English are coming….’ It’s Euro 2004, and the English have already arrived. They are sitting in clumps around the fountain, groups of pink, misshapen men, wearing St George T-shirts and shellsuit bottoms or shorts. Some are glum, nursing a can of beer as consolation for a lost wallet or a night spent in the park. Others are jovial, the kind of men who think it a lark to try to dance with passing women or moon the Italian supporters drinking coffee underneath the awnings across the square. And there’s a group who are staring angrily, red-faced, up for it, whachewfuckinlookinat?

The football hooligan is one of those indelible images of England which the world carries in its mind. Even Donald Rumsfeld, maintaining that reports of lawlessness in Iraq had been exaggerated, said, ‘We know what happens at a soccer game in England.’