Football and its ills come home

IT's not easy to be an England supporter abroad. Over the next three weeks we will find out if it is any easier to support the national team at home.

I remember six years ago in Italy, watching the English and Irish fans together in Sardinia before the two nations met at football the following day. There was no trouble. The two groups drank and sang together all night. But the English emerged in a demoralised state: they had only a few songs to sing - Rule Brittania and God Save Our Team - while the Irish had hundreds. Talk about cultural poverty.

It's difficult to enjoy following England abroad if you don't mix easily with young, white males between 16 and 35 years of age. With their reputation preceding them, the standard treatment for foreign police forces is usually uncompromising. The English fans have grown used to being preemptively (ie arbitrarily) arrested at the slightest sign of trouble. They're used to the bars being shut and alcohol forbidden for the period of their stay in town.

Whenever you witness England's travelling support in amongst their equivalents from other European nations, you are struck by the contrast between the battalions of young Englishmen and the much more socially mixed groups of the others.

Amongst the Italians, French, Dutch and famously the Irish, the fan groups are made up of a wider cross-section of society, including couples, older men, women, and families with children. Grouped together they don't look threatening, however drunk and outlandish some of them may get. They don't look in the frame for violence and, consequently, it rarely happens.

But the English look like trouble. An undiluted wedge of boisterous young men, grouped together sometimes in fear of attack from others, drinking and messing about as young men do, appear a threat regardless. Their mood is often mistaken by foreign police forces who act first and judge later. The general English tendency for xenophobia is exacerbated by these regular reminders of how most `foreigners' hate them. It confirms their worst suspicions.

It's difficult to change these circumstances. How can you encourage other kinds of people to go? Would you pay good money to join the England fans abroad? But how else can the youthful, masculine constituency of the English support ever change if no one else will join them?

Watching England at Wembley is, of course, a different matter, though those same young men will be there in amongst a more broadly-based support. But following England either abroad or at home has not been much of a rewarding experience for decades in the footballing sense. With the exception of reaching the Italy World Cup semi-final in 1990, England have had little to cheer about since 1966.

Of course, that might all change over the next few weeks as England seeks its rehabilitation in world football in more ways than one. UEFA's decision to stage the Euro '96 Championships in England was a clear signal that English efforts to defeat hooliganism - and the massive restructuring of our football grounds following the Taylor Report - were about to be rewarded. As a `home' fixture, it is also a rare opportunity to make a footballing impact in international competition. Failure on either the public order or the footballing agendas will have a serious knock-on effect.

Anything less than a quarter-final place would be popularly, seen as a footballing disaster, triggering a whole new phase of internal wrangling about our training and coaching methods, tactics, organisation and administration of football. A semi-final or better would encourage most, and a victory in the final would be gratefully accepted as a vindication of English determination and spirit. So much for the footballing agenda.

The public order issue may well depend to some extent on what happens on the football pitch. An early English exit from the competition (after the preliminary stages) may trigger resentment attacks on any thing or person who represents the appropriate foreign nation. Many forget that after England's defeat by Germany in Italy, Gazza may have wept but hundreds of young Englishmen went on the rampage - not in Turin but back home in England. As the television broadcast of the semi-final finished, dozens of mini riots took place in towns and villages across England. Volkswagon cars were trashed and shops with German goods attacked, fights with `foreigners' occurred with one man dying in the disorder that night.

The English police, as they prepare for Euro '96, are well aware of the problems they, face. There is a reasonable confidence about security in and around the much-improved, all-seater stadia. The English police have the experience (unfortunately) and the technology to make hooliganism inside football grounds an act almost certain of arrest and conviction. Video cameras have made sure of that.

The difficulties are more likely to come in city centres, hours, perhaps days, before or after a match. In the event of an English defeat, you can't have police standing next to every German car or Italian restaurant in the land. But it's too easy to draw a depressing picture of this great football festival ahead. It's one of the problems English football faces every time our own media set a negative agenda which seems inevitably to predict violence (which sells newspapers) and when violence comes (which also sells newspapers) it seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of course there are risks, but I do not expect major trouble during Euro '96. For a start, we are at home not abroad. There will be one or two matches of `high risk': England v Scotland or Germany v Holland, for example.

But the vast majority of the matches should pass off smoothly and without incident. We should remember that over a quarter of a million football fans will visit England for the competition and we should not get too excited if there are a few idiots amongst them to join our own. But most of the time (unreported by the media) people from all over Europe will be drinking and socialising together, talking football, the one language which seems to span the globe these days. And - unlike fighting between young men - that's something which does not happen every Saturday night.