Soccer Madness

It won’t last, but the appalling catastrophe in Brussels, where 38 spectators were killed before the start of a football match between a British team from Liverpool and an Italian team from Turin, has had a traumatic and, one may hope, salutary effect in Britain. What shook people was not just the mindless brutality, the dreadful scenes on television, but the fact that this kind of behavior cuts clean across the traditional image the British have of themselves and like to think that the rest of the world still has of them. Foreigners are expected to riot, and are despised for it by sensible law-abiding Englishmen: but these were English hooligans behaving in a way that shocked the foreigners.

There was no room for dispute about what happened; the whole world saw it on television. Yelling, drunken Liverpool supporters attacked the Italians. And far from being a solitary outrage, this was merely the latest and ugliest eruption in a swath of violence carved by British soccer fans during the past twenty years.

AL

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Anthony Lejeune

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It won’t last, but the appalling catastrophe in Brussels, where 38 spectators were killed before the start of a football match between a British team from Liverpool and an Italian team from Turin, has had a traumatic and, one may hope, salutary effect in Britain. What shook people was not just the mindless brutality, the dreadful scenes on television, but the fact that this kind of behavior cuts clean across the traditional image the British have of themselves and like to think that the rest of the world still has of them. Foreigners are expected to riot, and are despised for it by sensible law-abiding Englishmen: but these were English hooligans behaving in a way that shocked the foreigners.

There was no room for dispute about what happened; the whole world saw it on television. Yelling, drunken Liverpool supporters attacked the Italians. And far from being a solitary outrage, this was merely the latest and ugliest eruption in a swath of violence carved by British soccer fans during the past twenty years.