Newspaper readers will know by now that Egyptians think the rump of the Mubarak regime armed the Port Said 'fans' and set them on the visiting Cairiotes, locking some of the stadium doors and standing back, as vengeance for the Cairo fans' role in the recent, uncompleted, 'revolution'.
Sounds fairly convincing to me. And quite a revenge, with 70-plus dead and thousands hurt. Many of the victims were shoved off the back of the stadium to fall to their deaths.
Football and its fans bore me rather so you wouldn't catch me in a stadium anywhere. But even if I were a keen enthusiast I wouldn't go to a game in North Africa. A couple of Italian hacks told me once that they had gone to a match between Morocco and Algeria (in Algeria I think) and had never been so terrified in their lives. They had retreated to the rear parapet of the stadium under the showers of bricks and bottles and ended up hanging over the edge by their hands. Then the police had turned up and started bashing their knuckles with truncheons forcing them to let go and drop 20 or 30 feet to the ground along with many others.
What fun, eh?
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I think we are lucky with our sport. In rugger all the violence takes place on the pitch and in football most of it, with a few side shows of shirt stripping, badge kissing, diving and gobbiing off at the officials. Beautiful, not in my book!
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Sounds like a normal Saturday afternoon down the den (Millwall) to me.
No one like us, no one likes us, no one likes us, we don't care,
we're the Lions, we're the Lions, we're the Lions, from the den.
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The beautiful game - Meldrew
