Middle-aged yobs happy to roll back the years

SIDELINE CUT: Last Wednesday night's events at Upton Park looked more like a last hurrah for the veteran hooligans, even though their pathetic presence evoked memories of football's darkest days.

HE LOOKED like a museum piece, the leering and belligerent West Ham fan caught on television the other night. He might have stepped from a cast of wax figures in Madame Tussaud’s detailing English miscreants through the ages: the Football Hooligan, circa 1987.

Here was someone who belonged to the age of Margaret Thatcher, of Cilla Black chortling through Blind Dateand Morrissey waving gladioli on the Old Grey Whistle Test. Wednesday night marked the return of Yob, complete with the rolls of baby fat, the tattoos and the Dr Marten's; back with a vengeance.

The revival of some good old-fashioned ultra-violence at the League Cup clash between West Ham and Millwall partially answered a question that must have occurred to many people in the years since English football hooliganism was a ritual part of any Saturday: what happened to all the hooligans?

The Football Association has transformed the image of the English national game so thoroughly, it is easy to forget just how barbaric and inhuman that culture had become no more than 15 years ago.

The shocking scenes at the Heysel Stadium in 1985, when charging Liverpool fans caused panic among Juventus supporters and a wall’s collapse crushed 39 Italian fans to death prior to the European Cup final against Juventus left England’s FA isolated and in shame, its football clubs cast out due to a minority of hard-core fans whose chief interest was in causing mayhem and violence.

It seems incredible now, given the pleasant well-designed football stadiums in Europe’s major cities, that Uefa should have chosen Heysel’s dilapidated stadium to host that year’s showpiece game. And it remains incomprehensible that the match actually went ahead – Juventus winning 1-0 via a penalty – while 39 people were carried away either dead or dying.

Fear and ignorance, of course, governed the decision to go ahead with the game. Ignorance as to the extent of the injuries and fatalities and fear of what might happen if the match was abandoned and tens of thousands of disgruntled fans were pitched back onto the streets of Brussels. That night has been recorded in news and television documentaries, it has been the subject of court hearings and, most recently, of a bleak and compelling novel, In the Crowd, written by a Frenchman, Laurence Mauvignier.

Heysel placed English football – and by extension England herself – in a kind of international limbo and the renegade fans who terrorised England’s football grounds were seen to represent all that was worryingly wrong with English society.

The methodology employed to try to rid the game of the hooliganism – the ID cards, the no-tolerance police presence, and the segregation of fans – was slow and painstaking. And in the five years after Heysel, England had to endure its own purges – most notably the Bradford stadium fire and the Hillsborough disaster, both of which were indicative of hopelessly outdated grounds and a system which meant fans had to be marshalled and corralled like animals.

But they did turn it around.

It took time. The Lansdowne Road riot took place a full decade after Heysel. But that Dublin provocation seemed like the last stand of a beaten sect. A new mood had gradually taken hold in England.

As was detailed in a recently-published book, The Last Game, by Jason Cowley, the dramatic season finale between Arsenal and Liverpool, when Michael Thomas scored the injury-time goal that meant the Londoners and not the grieving Liverpudlians would be crowned league champions, brought a peculiarly warm afterglow to a ghastly season.

That match – because of the fixture congestion after Hillsborough – was played on a Friday night and, because of that novelty, lived on in the minds of those who saw it. In 1993, Nick Hornby's book Fever Pitchhad been published and it became an unlikely smash hit and signalled that being a football supporter was not all about being hate-filled. The Premiership was beginning to bloom, Alex Ferguson had taken a grip at Old Trafford, and Brian Clough was bowing out at Notts forest. The new order was in place.

Soon, the wire cages that had cut the fans off from the players were removed. People could sit down at games. Slowly but surely they were treated like people and then like customers. It became safe to bring wives, girlfriends and children to the storied English football grounds of Lancashire and London.

Slowly and then quickly, it all changed. Going to a Premier league match was as safe and middle class as going to see an Andrew Lloyd Webber show in the West End.

And occasionally you would watch Match of the Dayand wonder where all the raging young men of the 1980s had gone. It is a bit like what happened to all the old punks, the pierced Mohicans who spent the late 1970s gathering around Eros at Piccadilly. Gone to be middle-aged was the most obvious answer; gone to be daddies and then grand daddies.

But did they keep the old D M’s and the knuckle-dusters and the Buster Bloodvessel braces stored away in a box underneath the bed just for old times sake? Just as the older generation of Englanders kept their memorabilia from the Queen’s coronation, did the sons of the Hooligan Nation keep their ticket stubs from Kenilworth Road in 1985, when the cops took a hiding?

Did some of those old hooligans turn into property developers and develop a taste for fine wine during the boom of the last decade?

Did they end up taking seats behind the smoked windows of the corporate boxes that any self-respecting football club had to have by the turn of the millennium And were they not secretly bored silly by it all? Did they not privately yearn for the old days, when the chase from the Bobbies, the batons and the blood and the flick of the blade got their hearts racing like nothing else could?

For all the stern commentary and warnings after Wednesday night’s ructions on the streets of London, there was a sense that the sudden and vivid return of the boot-boy was about nostalgia as much as violence.

There was something pathetic about the fat lads running through the bemused football players and pointing their chubby fingers, being belligerent as best they could. The wobbly lads stormed the field, sang their songs and toddled off home, to die in bed.

Perhaps the end of prosperity, the return of the Tories, rising unemployment and the subsequent boredom will bring about a mood for violence in a new generation of football fans. But last Wednesday night looked more like a last hurrah for the old-timers and even though their presence evoked memories of the darkest events, it was comforting to think that it could never get so bad again. Or could it?