The uneasy quiet before it's 'all gorn off'

Locker Room: It's grotesquely early and we've been out of the airport about five minutes when that old standby of jaded columnists, the taxi driver, comes through for us again.

He is a hard-working man. His friends are all hard-working people. They like a wine and a beer. You understand, don't you, they can hold their wine and their beer?

Take Saturday night. Portugal lost to Greece on Saturday night. Although their morale fell quicker than a Royston Brady tracking poll, the taxi driver and his friends drank wine and beer and shrugged their shoulders and got on with life.

"We have good players," said the taxi driver philosophically, "but we have not got a good team."

All this, the taxi driver suggests - at least that part of the narrative which relates to drinking beer and wine and shrugging shoulders - contrasts starkly with the behaviour of the English. The English, the taxi driver has observed, are like "crazee facking monkees".

Some economic context. The taxi driver worked many years in order to buy his car. It's a nice car and it gives him a decent living. So he didn't need the hassle of having the crazy English monkeys step up onto the bonnet of the car, there to dance a while before proceeding to the roof area to do some trampolining.

Now, news of the crazy English monkeys prompts two things to occur within the body of this passenger at least. A shiver comes out and runs tentatively along the rubbery column which passes for my spine. And a little thought sets out across the great barren desert of my brain. Dancing on your taxi mate? Listen, that's not so bad.

And shockingly, it's not so bad. That's how the goallines has shifted. Drunken fans dancing on the cars of the city which is playing host to them isn't the worst that can happen. Not by a long chalk. Every time you hear a police klaxon sound in the streets of Lisbon you cock your ear lest there be a second and a third and a fourth, all on their way to some spot where it's "all goroff".

There's a great celebration going on in a beautiful city and all the time Lisbon is braced and waiting. All the time the city is judging what the precise level of disorder and ignorance needs to be before it acts. And what will the cost of taking action be? And so on.

For those of us who covered France '98, there was a little sigh of relief when the Sports Editor announced that there was a specific member of staff being designated to cover the English, in the event of it all going off. There was a little sigh of relief, and then a dash to a private area wherein dancing and happy calls to relatives took place.

This designated member of staff, brave and noble soul that he is, is welcome to the task. And he will do it well. Anything sent in by your current correspondent would tend to be highly personalised and self-pitying. The Sports Editor has chosen well.

The thing about dealing with English hooligans is that there is no rationalising with them. Most of us imagine that, in a sticky situation, if we played our cards right we would be able to talk ourselves to some sort of safety. We Irish who suffer from the delusion that everyone loves us are especially prone to this. We'd make eye-contact. Empathise. Make no sudden movements.

With the English hooligan that's all a waste of time. Running away as quickly as your pudgy little feet will carry you is easily the wisest option. I've seen it done. I've done it myself.

One morning, at a railway station in France during that wonderful 1998 World Cup, some days after it had "all gorn off" in Marseilles, I joined a queue of people buying tickets for Paris. Mainly French people. A couple of lads with three lions on their shirt. The station was like a battlefield, the bodies of sleeping and drunk English fans strewn everywhere. Little mountain ranges of beercans and bottles covering the floor. No sense of imminent danger, though.

Then a little exchange at the ticket desk.

"Ow much is two tickets to Paris?" belched the passenger in the red English jersey.

"I'm sorry," said the ticketman in an inflammatory French accent, "more slowly please."

"Speak fackin' English," shouted the football fan, and with that he drove his fist right through the glass partition which separated him from the ticketman.

As one, all the ticket vendors vanished through a door. All the French commuters seemed to evaporate. All the English fans who had been sleeping woke up. I went and stood in a phone kiosk. And for 20 minutes they bellowed like a volcano. They chanted and abused and mocked and threw stuff, and then, for want of something to fuel the volcano, it subsided.

Some police arrived, but they were jolly fellows not given to cracking heads. The railway staff reappeared. More passengers arrived. Everything went back to normal.

Everyone present would have agreed that it could have been worse. The fans could have razed the place to the ground. The railway station had got off lightly.

Little incidents like that are commonplace when you follow England about the place (South Korea and Japan in 2002 was a pleasant exception. So too, to be fair, was England '96).

This column has cowered in some interesting places. At a roundabout in Lens, with a Belgian journalist, we cowered bilingually for about an hour. That was the record. Most of the other cowering has been solo stuff, but always the next day you expect that such random, hideous violence as you have been cowering from will be the lead item on news bulletins the world over, that Larry King will have you live on CNN giving your harrowing survivor's account.

The reality is that unless the arrest rate and the casualty figures get into treble figures the event is deemed to be a success. The infliction of mere unpleasantness, the destruction of public facilities, the rituals of mass intimidation, mass urination and mass intoxication are just by-products of the business.

It seems so insolubly unfair. To the English first of all. Is it not enough that most of us have an atavistic streak which makes us enjoy English defeats almost as much as our own victories? But for us to actually enjoy and crave their absence or their departure? Or to have a secret compartment in the brain which yearns for it to be "all gorn off" because it fits the prejudice?

It's a cliche, but most English fans are good company. Many have a highly developed sense of irony about their collective image. But as a group they just seem to lack a self-policing system or a good marketing agency.

The Dutch, on the other hand, can riot to world class levels but their rioting is sparked usually by something a little cerebral. Controversy over dialect. Heated debate over art history. The mere fact of encountering foreigners in foreign places doesn't do it for them. Generally they are just big, loud and loveable.

So unfair to hosts. At the time of writing the behaviour of English fans in Lisbon was being deemed a triumph. There were streets down which no sane person would walk and nobody will buy the taxi driver a new car, but nobody was dead and no buildings were smoldering.

The taxi driver drove us through the streets towards the gleaming media centre and pointed out that even though it was early morning every street had been cleaned and swept and was spic and span. He knew in his heart that the hordes were sweeping beerily up from the Algarve all day yesterday, that his lovely city would be under siege for 24 hours and that win or lose there was no knowing which way the beast would react; but the mix of sunshine, beer and foreigners was unlikely to have a positive influence.

We wished him the best. Hoped it would stay fine for him. Lisbon is stunning just now, and the grandeur of the vision of the hosts makes a mockery of our own ambitions to stage this type of event. Everything runs sweetly and with friendliness. The architecture, the modernity, the stadiums, the colour, the bridges. Breathtaking.

We waded on in, hoping it would stay fine for all of them, resenting having to keep our fingers crossed, glad we were such accomplished cowerers.