Life's a riot for hooligan hordes World Cup PR sidestepped

TV View: They swarmed across towards the bar en masse. It was a terrible sight, bellies hanging out, pints swilling, everyone in a high state of aggression. They didn't care about the women or children, some of whom were held high by anxious parents trying to avoid the violent crush. Some were screaming, others were taunting passers-by and dropping their trousers.

One semi-naked woman was carried aloft by a large man as dozens of drunken lads reached over heads and shoulders in a frenzy to grope and pull at her bare breasts.

The Fianna Fáil tent at the Galway Races, when last orders are called, can, indeed, be a terrifying sight. But this wasn't Galway, it was Stuttgart during this summer's World Cup.

That's the World Cup where there was no crowd trouble, no Nazi salutes, no mobs of British yobs breaking up city centre bars, no riot police dispatched to restore law and order and where German people again felt confident enough to sing their national anthem and wave their national flag? Hooligans: a Panorama Special, lifted the lid on that piece of dissimulation.

Not one but every German city the English team travelled to during their threadbare and passionless assault on the competition, the drunken hordes followed, causing mayhem. While the programme called them riots, they actually paled to insignificance compared to a genuine fear-free Belfast or Derry riot.

Let's just say this. You cannot riot properly with a full pint in each hand, staggering backwards on your heels when your intention is to go forwards to spit on a Brazilian girl's face. You just can't do it.

You simply cannot visit emergency-room level suffering and violence on locals, property and other fans unless you use both hands and move towards the target.

That said, Hooligans demonstrated how large numbers of fat, drunken men terrified and caused harm to many in an inventively racist way, often at the behest of seemingly sober and well-known hooligans, who had somehow sidestepped the police net-of-steel at the borders and airports and slipped into the country.

The first shot was of Frankfurt's red light district, a popular meeting place for English Firms abroad, where German fans attacked English drinkers before suffering what was called "an explosion of violence".

With hookers hanging out the windows of the Eros Centre, arms folded and sanguine, presumably in the knowledge that at least tonight they wouldn't be taking the brunt of the abuse, and the police standing on the sides watching, it was quite a picture. Running commentary added even more colour.

"Looking on were a gang of Hell's Angels, who run security in the red light district," we were told. "When the police tried to move in on them, they took exception," added the hardly surprised narrator before explaining how this was not supposed to happen at all, except at Rolling Stones concerts 30 years ago.

"It wasn't meant to be like this. Security was huge. 170,000 England fans were expected to arrive. English police were allowed on German streets for the first time," he said as the camera identified numerous "Firm heads", celebrity hooligans and top trouble-makers, all known to the police in England.

"There is going to be 3,000 hooligans missing from this tournament," said a reformed hooligan, referring to the fact that police had prevented 3,000 thugs from travelling. "If anyone thinks there's only 3,000 hooligans in England, they need their heads examined."

And so Panorama continued to show. While English police would have waded in with truncheons, shields and mace, the stoic German force stood around hoping the lack of response would bore the hordes into some kind of lager-fuelled passivity.

"My granddad killed your granddad, toor-aloor-aloor. My granddad killed your granddad, toor-a-loor-a-lay," they chanted until a couple of girls came into view "Aaaay, get your tits out. Get your tits out. Get your tits out now. Geeeet your tits out now."

And so it continued. How gleefully the fans, draped in the English flag, smiled as they gave the illegal Nazi salute from the exact spot Adolf Hitler did during the Nuremberg rallies. Then, once tanked up, the evening's inevitable "explosion of violence" and maelstrom of plastic chairs and bottles sailing through the air of another town centre repeated itself.

A bemused journalist asked a police official why his force largely stood idly by.

"We know that with hooligans they want to beat up people, who threaten them (two Brazilian girls, a Tunisian and locals). So we wanted our police force to come across as friendly," he said.

Wolfgang, the mayor of Stuttgart, added: "We are living in an open society. You cannot tell people where to go."

The only deduction you could make is that it was all very German on one side and all very English on the other.