After Wednesday, just thank God we are not at Euro '08
Source: Mirror.co.uk (Original Article)
Thanks to a football match being shown on city centre screens, drunken anarchy was unleashed which shocked the nation.
Hundreds of yobs attacked riot police, bottles were thrown, by-passers terrified, blood spilt and arrests made.
I’m not talking about Manchester the other night, but London, Liverpool and Manchester after England’s opening game of the 2006 World Cup, when violence broke out in front of big screens, which forced councils to switch them off until the tournament ended.
Any moral superiority being felt by the English over the “pack of wolves” who attach themselves to Rangers is illadvised.
To any observer outside our shores the scene in Manchester on Wednesday was painfully familiar: Tens of thousands of loud, shirtless Brits colonising a city centre and getting legless before watching their team outclassed by slick-passing foreigners, taking their anger out on the local police, getting arrested by the dozen, then claiming it was everyone’s fault but theirs.
Been there before, haven’t we? Countless times. Both at home and abroad. During June 2006, while German police were watching out for the 3,500 England fans who’d been given banning orders, copsmade 938 World Cup-related arrests in this country.
The only people to blame for the Manchester riots were the few hundred yahoos who attached themselves to Rangers.
But what were Manchester Council thinking when they invited half of Glasgow and Belfast down to party, waiving their ban on drinking in open places, to facilitate a booze-fuelled gathering of Clan Orange?
They knew from experience of their own inability to handle crowds watching football on big screens. Yet still they lured them in the hope of pocketing a few million quid while boosting their standing as a party city.
When will authorities learn that public screens and fan zones do not work for Brits because virtually every time we are faced BOSTON LEGAL dvd with an over-hyped football match one …continue reading