Sideline Cut: Euro 2016 games behind closed doors would be an affront

Would there even be a point to playing the Euro 2016 championship behind closed doors?

That the idea had been voiced is a further example of the heavy sense of burden shared by Uefa and the French authorities to ensure safe passage for everyone visiting the country for what should is supposed to be a festival of football: a celebration of life.

The images from Nimes taken a week ago, when French authorities simulated the security and medical response to a notional chemical attack at one of the fan zones, gave a glimpse into the thinking and concerns and fears of those responsible with hosting Euro 2016. That took place in St Patrick’s Day, well before the bombs went off in Brussels. In the hours after that atrocity, thoughts inevitably turned to the attack on the Stade de France last November and to the implications for the European championship.

As Belgium mourns those who died in Brussels, its football association made swift arrangements to relocate next Tuesday evening’s planned friendly with Portugal from the stricken city to Leiria.

A Uefa executive said that the prospect of playing the tournament behind closed doors could not be ruled out. At a press conference, Republic of Ireland manager Martin O’Neill responded to a question on that subject with the view that if that was the protocol, he would have no problem in following it. Uefa swiftly issued a statement clarifying that there is no intention to do so. But the idea is at the back of everyone’s mind. At the very least, everyone attending this summer’s football festival in France are mentally preparing themselves for daily delays and endless lines through security scanners and guards. People won’t mind that.

The purpose of heavy security is twofold. The first is to try and minimise, if not entirely eliminate, the opportunity for any repeat of the atrocities in Paris last November and Brussels last week. The second is to make people feel a safer.

Under attack

In the hours after the mass murders in Brussels, world leaders, led by Barack Obama, formed a chorus to voice their condemnation. What are you supposed to do with the observation that the Brussels massacre was “an attack on democracy” except nod and think: yes, that’s exactly what it was. Or with caretaker Taoiseach Kenny’s declaration that “once again, Europe is under attack”.

The language is designed to preserve the fanciful notion that there is a genuine kinship and solidarity at work in Europe. But under attack? That’s bound to get a laugh among the citizens of Iraq and Syria – assuming, that is, they tune into Oireachtas Report on their Dream boxes.

It’s true that statesmen and women are constrained by the language of diplomacy. There isn’t much they can say beyond the stock sympathy and measured outrage.

That’s why, of all the highly publicised western world condemnations, the most direct came from singer Adele, who took a time out between power-ballad heaven at her concert in the O2 in London to declare: ‘You’re on your own, you f***ing loners’. The bombers, she meant; not her audience.

It was the word ‘loners’ that stuck, chiming with the idea people began to form in the hours after Brussels of the few, just a very few holed up in their apartments, planning carnage. Within minutes, news of the atrocities spread around the world and the perpetrators – the planters of the idea rather than the actual device – sat back to watch the real result: not the immediate killings but the speed-of-light response and reaction across western Europe and the instant return of general fear and unease in all major cities.

The mass media coverage of the Brussels atrocities was inevitable and, of course, contributes to that collective sense of fear and unease.

In the Guardian this week, senior columnist Simon Jenkins wrote: 'The atrocities in Brussels happen almost daily on the streets of Baghdad, Aleppo and Damascus. Western missiles and Isis bombs kill more innocents in a week than die in Europe in a year. The difference is the media response. A dead Muslim is an unlucky mutt in the wrong place at the wrong time. A dead European is front page news.'

It is true. Western Europe has been a blessed place to live for the fortunate majority. That is why outrages like Brussels and Paris literally stun citizens in all of those countries. Random attacks on innocent people at a concert and a football match in Paris, at an airport and train station in Brussels, are nightmares that everyone can easily conjure.

Live story

Terror acts in the sporting arena tend to stay vivid. Of all the terrorist acts of the 1970s, the kidnapping and murders of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics travelled through as a live story in the subsequent decades, creating a mini-industry of books, a major documentary, a Spielberg movie. The Boston marathon bombing in 2013 struck a nerve across America; two brothers made a superpower look vulnerable again. And the attack at Stade de France in November, with France and Germany on the field, stopped all football federations still at the thought of what could be coming down the tracks.

The world of sport is as choked with the same imperfections and conceits and betrayals and greed as politics or entertainment or religion. But for all of that, its big summer jamborees are hugely life-affirming events. Euro 2016 should be – and will be – a triumph of human spirit and emotion. It will, of course, also be a messy few weeks of excess and foolishness: tens of thousands of supporters following their in some cases obscenely wealthy football heroes around France, shellacking out a king’s ransom for grim hotels, eating out, drinking too much and generally exhibiting every manner of the behaviours that Islamic fanatics want to obliterate.

To strike at the football games, on one of those summer nights when tens of millions of eyes will be glued to television sets to watch the old European colonialists –England, France, Belgium, Holland – square up; of course those nights are dream targets for the ‘loners’that are surely out there, embedded in whatever city, planning their contribution to jihad.

Of course, there is no alternative for France but to stage Euro 2016; to invite visitors from across the continent to enjoy its cities and to turn up at its football grounds so they can shout for their teams.

Football games in empty arenas would be a mockery – not to mention an intolerable affront to the sensibility of Zlatan Ibrahimovic. Football is for the people; that’s the point of Euro 2016. It’s vital now that the masses shout louder than ever. It doesn’t matter a toss who wins Euro 2016. But staging it in all its messy glory, all nationalities and creeds mingling and and living it; that is the important thing.