Our soccer fans are by no means the most thuggish in the world, says Rod Liddle, and he’ll glass any smug Scotch git who says they are
A rather smug, bearded Scotsman upbraided me the other day when I was queuing for a drink at one of those left-of-centre London wine bars where the staff look at you with opprobrium if you order the house Chardonnay. His complaint was with something I’d written about the Euro 2004 football championship — to the effect that it was OK, for 90 minutes, to loathe the opposition for their real or imagined national characteristics. It made the game more fun, I’d argued.
‘Don’t you realise that you are encouraging English football hooliganism?’ he said, stressing the word ‘English’, of course. He was smug and sententious, something I’ve never seen before in a man holding a bowl of Twiglets. And then, with weary inevitability, he added the following: ‘It’s only the English, you know, who equate football with warfare. Nobody else does.’ And so saying away he went, to munch upon an oversalted snack fit only for a six-year-old.
His argument is rot, obviously, but it is nonetheless very ‘au currant’. And not just among those jealous and embittered Celtic brothers of ours from Shannon to Wick via Aberystwyth. One might expect the Scots and the Welsh and the Irish to yearn for a) England’s swift elimination from the tournament and, perhaps privately, b) for English hooligans to cause as much trouble as possible in Portugal — partly in order to assuage the unbearable and unpalatable truth that their own national teams were too inept to qualify for 2004 and partly because, in a more general sense, they seem to hate us anyway and revel in our discomforts.
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