English hooligans are pussycats

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.