Euro 2020/2021

[alfred russel]

*Deletes draft post of Euro 2020 footballers as ACW generals*

Well in both cases the winning sides war blue...

And Southgate not only has South in his name but also lost...

[Duque de Bragança]

[Grey Fox]

No.

[Tamas]

I don't quite understand there. Disabled people were able to pay at the gate and some gits were trying to exploit this?

No. disabled people with tickets had separate entrances. Some of the scum thought those gates were easier targets since probably they had fewer barriers and obstacles.

[crazy canuck]

Absolutely right!

[FunkMonk]

Thinking back on this Euro, I think my biggest take away is that the English team might not be a total joke anymore. They might actually be one of the big boys to be taken seriously. But the possibility still exists this was just a Cinderella run we sometimes get like Greece in 2004. I guess Qatar will ultimately prove that one way or the other.

England made it to a World Cup semifinal in 2018. Got to a final this year and played a superior Italy to penalties. They are absolutely a serious team that should be considered among the favorites next year. I don't know how you can look at their recent form in international tournaments and think otherwise.

[Valmy]

Thinking back on this Euro, I think my biggest take away is that the English team might not be a total joke anymore. They might actually be one of the big boys to be taken seriously. But the possibility still exists this was just a Cinderella run we sometimes get like Greece in 2004. I guess Qatar will ultimately prove that one way or the other.

England made it to a World Cup semifinal in 2018. Got to a final this year and played a superior Italy to penalties. They are absolutely a serious team that should be considered among the favorites next year. I don't know how you can look at their recent form in international tournaments and think otherwise.

The history prior to 2018 left a deep stench of failure. It takes awhile to wash that off.

[Sheilbh]

The history prior to 2018 left a deep stench of failure. It takes awhile to wash that off.

I think that's partly why Southgate is so popular - he has achieved with a less talented squad. And they may not be superb, or win anything, but they seem to play as a team.

And after a generation of watching Rooney and Lampard and Gerrard do very well in the Premier League and the Champions League but then seemingly forget how to play football as soon as they pull on an England shirt it is very refreshing to see.

Just to add to Tamas's comments - yeah the break in of fans mainly happened in the disabled and VIP areas because those are the bits of Wembley that you reach first from Wembley Way. So Harry Maguire's father was injured by these ticketless forcing their way in and jostling, other family members of the players were racially abused. And all of this happened beneath the press box (which makes the initial denials by the FA all the more baffling). It is simultaneously worse than I think people realise and could have been so much worse. The Athletic have been outstanding on this.

A general piece on the day:
https://theathletic.com/2703455/2021/07/13/english-footballs-day-of-embarrassment-and-why-it-has-damaged-2030-world-cup-bid/

And a piece from a woman's perspective by Caoimhe O'Neill (one of their Liverpool writers):
https://theathletic.com/2704711/2021/07/15/this-is-what-you-endure-watching-england-as-a-woman-misogyny-sexism-and-the-constant-fear-of-being-touched-without-consent/

In this context I'd note the announcement that Met Commissioner Cressida Dick (after a litany of failures that should have ended her career from the shooting of de Menezes onwards) is to become Dame Cressida Dick. And the Met issued this statement which is just extraordinary:

LATEST: Statement - Policing of Euro 2020 final
News   •   Jul 14, 2021 16:09 BST

Statement from Deputy Assistant Commissioner Jane Connors, following security incident at Wembley Stadium during Euro 2020 final:

"On Sunday, for the first time in more than 50 years, England had qualified for the final of a major international football tournament. This was meant to be a day of national pride, full of jubilance and celebration.

"In the main, the day was exactly that. However, it was sadly tarnished by a minority of disorderly and violent fans who attempted to hijack the final for their own selfish personal gain. Throughout the course of the day, police officers witnessed disgraceful behaviour both in central London and at Wembley, where a number of people pushed through security cordons or fought with police officers.

"I share the nation's anger at this behaviour. I want to reiterate the Met's commitment to identifying those responsible for the scenes both in Wembley and in central London, their actions will have consequences.

"Ahead of the final, police commanders deployed one of the most significant and comprehensive policing plans the Met has ever committed to a football match of this scale. In Wembley, soon into the day it became clear that a high number of fans were arriving without tickets.

"Police commanders recognised this could result in ticketless fans attempting to get into the stadium, they updated security officials at Wembley of this risk. To support the stewarding efforts, further highly trained public order officers were deployed to Wembley Stadium as a precaution.

"Soon after gates opened, the stewarding and outer security perimeter became overwhelmed and fans began pushing through security checks. I want to praise the quick response by police commanders and those brave officers who confronted these subsequent scenes of disorder and violence.

"I am in no doubt that their swift action prevented any further escalation. Frustratingly, 19 of our officers were injured during the course of Sunday's policing operation when confronting volatile crowds.

"I do not accept that the policing operation failed and I standby the difficult decisions made by police officers and the Met's public order commanders. Without their immediate intervention, it is possible that this game could have been abandoned.

"The ugly scenes at Wembley on Sunday night will rightly be reviewed by the Football Association and by police. Where lessons can be learnt we will work with partners to ensure that future matches are not disrupted by a group of hooligans who are fueled on alcohol."

+ As part of the policing operation for the Euro 2020 final, 51 people were arrested across London; 26 of those were arrested while policing events in Wembley, with 25 arrests following events in central London. As part of the post-incident investigation, we expect further arrests to follow in the days and weeks ahead.

This is a minor point - but it is bullshit that they were "fueled on alcohol". But separately it is just extraordinary that they're still saying that they had a plan in place and it worked and thanks to them everything was not as bad as it could be. "I do not accept that the policing operation failed"

I've said it before - but I really think when it comes to public order policing the Met basically only crack-down if they think they won't be faced with violence which I'm really not sure is necessarily the best way to police that sort of event.

[Jacob]

Looks like both of those articles are for subscribers only Sheilbh.

[Barrister]

Looks like both of those articles are for subscribers only Sheilbh.

You can register an account and get, I think, 3 free articles per month at The Athletic.

The Athletic is the only news source I've ever paid for - it really is quite good if you're a sports fan.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah there is another very good story interviewing disabled fans about their experience.

Meanwhile in the Sun (from the Upshot newsletter):

FOOTBALL
🧨 Banged a load of powder

They say crime doesn't pay, but tell that to Charlie Perry. You may recognise him as the England fan with a flare up his bum and an ungodly amount of cocaine up his nose.

Now the 25-year-old roofer has trousered £11,000 in exchange for a tell-all interview with The Sun.

"I'd been on the piss since half eight in the morning and had had at least 20 cans of Strongbow," he told the red top, adding that he also "banged a load of powder" throughout the day.

It turns out Perry, who always wears a £545 Luis Vuitton bucket hat, is a veteran "gibber" - someone who breaks into stadiums without a ticket.

He snuck in at Wembley by bribing a fan £150 to let him "tailgate" them through the turnstiles, and then handed another £100 to a steward to smooth his entry.

In conclusion, he told the paper: "There were no rules that day. All I know is that I loved it all. I was off my face and I loved every minute. My mates and I had one of the best six weeks of our lives. See you in Qatar."

They're going to love him over there!

Apparently among gibbers Wembley has a reputation as a very soft-touch. There's lots of windows and not very well secured doors - so I think (he's a Chelsea fan) he's also broken into other Chelsea games at Wembley.

One other relevant factors - that I think may have been a mistake in retrospect - is for the entire tournament there were very few fan zones with the massive TV screens. I think this was because of covid - there's one in the Boxpark in Croydon, there was one for key workers in Trafalgar Square but the usual setup of having a big fanzone for thousands of fans in Hyde Park etc wasn't followed. I slightly wonder if it might have been a better option to open up loads of outdoor (ticketed) fanzones like we would in a normal tournament. It might help stop people congregating around Wembley but also reduce the numbers of people sat indoors in packed pubs watching the game?

[garbon]

Total aside but looking up Charlie Perry gave me a blurb on this man who apparently converted to Islam in his 2nd year at Oxford.

https://www.univ.ox.ac.uk/news/profile-charlie-perry/

[Sheilbh]

Reading that - how much he enjoyed Maths Week and the boys night during Wellness Week and the stuff about not drinking - and I think you've managed to find the other guy's polar opposite

[Josquius]

I hereby award sole ownership of the Charlie Perry name to Garbon's fellow.

And I thought my namesake with his drunken night out pics showing up on google image search was bad

[Sheilbh]

Rory Smith - the journalist I stole the cosplaying as England fans thought from has developed it in his newsletter - in the middle of three pieces that I entirely agree with.:

This Is England
By Rory Smith

By the end of the day, the scrawl of abuse had been buried beneath an avalanche of sticky notes and hand-drawn flags, homemade banners and paper hearts. Affection and appreciation had so convincingly drowned out malice and hate that they had colonized the wall. Now, only the top half of the mural was still visible: the face of Marcus Rashford, rising above it all.

There is a line in "30 Rock," the Tina Fey sitcom, delivered when the two central characters are on a visit to Stone Mountain, Ga., searching for "someone who represents the 'Real America.'" "For the 80th time," Fey's character responds, "no part of America is more American than any other part."

That is the thing with countries: They are generally so vast and so contradictory and so complex that they defy easy encapsulation, essentially arbitrary edifices eroded and expanded by human hands, established in some distant past and bound together by little more than the delicate, malleable forces of convention and tradition. They are because, for as long as anyone cares to remember, they have always been.

They are big cities and small towns, suburban sprawl and empty expanse, gleaming towers and forgotten corners. They exist in tax codes and legal documents and in the distinct imaginations and experiences of the hundreds of thousands, the hundreds of millions, who live within them: some who have known nothing else, some who have only just arrived.

England is no different. England is the country that is represented and reflected by its national soccer team: diverse and modern, progressive and compassionate. It is also the country that, with the apparent support of some of its leading politicians, booed those very same players when they had the nerve to express their diversity and progressivism.

It is the country that racially abused three Black players when they missed penalties on the final day of the Euros, but it is also the country that showered all three with love and support in response. It is the country that fashioned the person who daubed abuse — of a nonracist nature, according to the police — on the mural of Rashford in south Manchester, near where he grew up. But it is also the country that, within a few hours, buried that abuse beneath all of those flags and hearts.

And, no matter how tempting it is to think otherwise, neither of those countries can lay exclusive claim to being the country. England is both of those places, and it is neither, it is far off and it is somewhere in between, just like everywhere else. It all hinges on the England that you see, that you feel. No part of it is any more real than any other part.

Cosplay Hooligans

I think about the contrast often. Five years ago, during the first week of Euro 2016, I arrived in Toulouse, France, to cover a game between Spain and the Czech Republic. The train got in with a few hours to spare. It was spitting with rain, and the stadium was some distance away, around a bend in the Garonne river. But I had never been to Toulouse before, so I decided to walk.

It took an hour, maybe a little more. The city was full of Spanish fans; it is not far from the border. In almost every little square, one corner had been draped in red and yellow, a bar or a café or a restaurant adopted by a group of fans. Most of them were drinking. Some of them were singing. But, dispersed through the city, it did not feel overpowering. Normal people went about their normal lives. The mood was cordial, calm and a little celebratory.

A few days later, I went to St. Etienne, an industrial town on the other side of France. England was playing Slovakia in its final group stage game. Outside the train station, in the first public space any new arrival to the city would see, there were thousands of England fans. They had stepped off the train, they had found a couple of Irish pubs, and they had set up camp.

The mood was not particularly aggressive. The atmosphere was not troublingly hostile. But, at the same time, it was abundantly clear that this territory had been claimed. The border was demarcated by England flags. It was a corner of a foreign field that would — if not forever, then certainly for the afternoon — be England.

There are certain things that England fans do that are, in my experience, unique. One of them is how they sing their national anthem. "God Save The Queen" is, by global standards, a pretty tame sort of a song. There are no calls to establish battalions, or mentions of impure blood. As the journalist Barney Ronay once suggested, in some lights it is little more than a dirge, pleading with "an entity that doesn't exist to preserve one that shouldn't."

And yet "God Save The Queen" is the only anthem, in a soccer context, that is sung at people. Most fans stand, solemnly, during their anthem. In some countries, it is tradition to put a hand on the heart, or at least where people think it is. Only England fans sing their anthem with their arms outstretched, as if issuing a challenge.

The other thing they do is what they did that afternoon in St. Etienne. It is only sometimes that England fans hurl patio furniture or start running battles with the police. But they reliably annex space, not blending into it in small, discreet groups, but claiming a whole swath of a foreign city as their own for a few hours.

It is a tradition that has survived a change in generations, a change in approach. The mood around most England games, on foreign soil, is now not one of full-fledged hooliganism. It is, if anything, more akin to a particularly raucous bachelor party. There is a lot of drinking. There are drugs: One favored chant, dating to at least Euro 2016, is an ode to cocaine. There is, more often than is probably required at a sporting event, nudity.

It would take a brighter mind than mine to parse why that might be. Perhaps it is no mystery: maybe that is just how people, generally, cut loose. Perhaps it is how young English men experience foreign countries: It is what you do when you see the Mediterranean sun. The problem there, of course, is that these problems do not occur with fans of Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland, even though they go on the same sorts of holidays to the same sorts of places.

So, perhaps, it is something to do with England: not the country, but the soccer team. There are some who are old enough to have been in Marseille in 1998 and Charleroi in 2000, the final throes of the old hooliganism, and who might still yearn for a little topless wander down a memory lane that has a water cannon parked at one end.

But there are many more who will have seen the videos and watched the footage and inferred that this is what it is to be an England fan, that this is how you earn your stripes and support your country, and have become, in effect, cosplay hooligans. England is a chance to claim space and go a little wild; that is their role, their patriotic duty. That is what it is to be England.

The Storm

The question, in hindsight, is a simple one: What, exactly, did the police think was going to happen? Fans had been arriving at the Wembley Park underground station all day, gathering in ever greater numbers in the shadow of the stadium. Some of them — 60,000 or so — had tickets. Twice that number, three times possibly, did not.

By the time the teams for the Euro 2020 final were announced on Sunday night, it had been estimated that some 250,000 people were in the vicinity of Wembley. All that separated them from the stadium was one set of barriers, a subtle police presence, a few hundred volunteers, and stewards who are paid little more than minimum wage. What happened next was, in one sense, shocking. In another, it really wasn't.

Hundreds, and possibly thousands, of ticketless fans tried to storm the gates. Others bribed stewards to let them through, or presented screenshots of other people's Covid tests, or barreled through turnstiles behind those who had paid to be there. The atmosphere, outside, turned threatening and hostile.

Once inside, they blocked gangways or packed aisles or simply stood in the nonspaces between seats. Genuine ticket-holders were displaced. Fights broke out. There have been accounts, over the last few days, of families who had paid hundreds of dollars to attend the biggest game England has seen for 55 years leaving early out of fear.

It is soccer's instinct, on these occasions, to try to distance itself from the people who have dragged its name into disrepute. They are not, the statements always go, true fans. That is, most likely, not true — you can be a cat burglar and an art lover; no one part of you is more real than the other — but even if it were, it is an irrelevance.

England, the country, is not easily defined. It is neither one place nor the other. It is both one place and the other. But England, the team, or at least the atmosphere surrounding it, is uniform. The numbers, this time, were greater, because of both the scale and the location of the game, but this was, to an extent, simply London experiencing what many other places have endured, the annexation of space and the bachelor-party lawlessness. It was England looking into a mirror and seeing itself.

It so easily could have been avoided. More police might not have solved the problem, but restricting access to the area around the stadium to those with tickets would have helped. So, too, would have placing more obstacles, more security checks, between the entrance and the crowd. The Metropolitan Police, without doubt, handled a difficult situation — a nation teetering on the brink of ecstasy after 15 months of lockdown and misery — badly.

That should not allow soccer to absolve itself from blame. A crowd of that size defies easy encapsulation. There were many, in the stadium and out on Wembley Way, who did nothing wrong, who simply wanted to go and enjoy the atmosphere, or the game, or both. But there were plenty — perhaps a minority, perhaps not — who invoked that stag-party spirit of England, the team, who assumed that the occasion meant anything goes.

That is an atmosphere that has been allowed to fester, a tradition that has been given tacit permission to take hold. Increasing policing is not the answer to that problem; or, at least, it is not a responsible answer to it. This one, ultimately, rests on the fans: on what they want England, the team, to be. As Sunday proved, at the moment, one part is much more real than the other, and it is not the part that you want.

Linked to those reminisces to a worse England 20-25 years ago is the reaction to the penalty takers. I also didn't like the commentator saying they were young and had time to "redeem" themselves, and part of it is, inevitably, a reaction against the equally inevitable racism. But I am struck at the overwhelming messages of solidarity, love, support for those players who missed their penalties. As I say it is a world away from Southgate who is still defined by his penalty miss in 96 and was vilified for it. Similarly I remember the period after the 98 World Cup when Beckham was the most hated man in the country (effigies were burned etc) because of his red card for kicking Diego Simeone.

I don't know if that's a shift in Englishness or if it's a shift in masculinity from the 90s but it is really striking and either way a positive thing.