Own goal

by Alan Tyers

It was back to the ‘70s for West Ham v Millwall last night… but is football to blame?

The fighting around Upton Park for the League Cup game with Millwall was inevitable – it was only the scale that was surprising.

Plenty of decent supporters of both clubs decided to give the game a miss once the draw was made, correctly guessing that the atmosphere would be poisonous. And so it was.

On message boards and phone-ins this morning I have already seen/heard calls for: both clubs to be immediately booted out of the football league, England to have their bid for the World Cup struck off, the stadia of both teams to be bulldozed, and of course various degrees of retribution from the “flog ‘em and hang ‘em” brigade.

But should football be taken to task? Perhaps the reason the events have been so widely covered (top story on Sky News, for instance) is that they are, nowadays, very rare at matches. Also, the sight of fat, 40-year-old men waddling aggressively is always good TV.

But this is hardly an everyday occurrence. Nor, despite what some of the more sensational news outlets might have you believe, is it the end of the world as we know it. It’s not like London has been ransacked by Barbarian marauders.

As ever, there will be plenty of “Football In The Dock” headlines, but I would argue that this is only tangentially to do with football. The thick, aggressive, chavs with nothing better to do are always with us; football is merely a handy peg on which to hang their Burberry hat.

An ad break during the Sky News coverage of the SHOCKING SCENES featured a trailer for a film: Nick Love’s redundant remake of ‘80s football hooligan classic The Firm. Don’t encourage them, for God’s sake – and blame society, not football.

Hillsborough, 20 years on

by Simon Glover

Twenty years ago today, Britain’s worst ever sporting disaster struck Sheffield when a horrific crowd crush brought tragedy to an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough.

I was working as a news reporter on the Sheffield Star, cutting my teeth on my first big-city newspaper. My son Joe had been born just two days before so I wasn’t involved on the day itself, but I helped cover the ongoing story for many years.

I remember how the disaster sent shockwaves through football fans everywhere. Sometimes, it can be difficult to truly empathise with disaster victims – but most of us, back then, had stood on an overcrowded terrace and feared for our safety.

In the days after the tragedy, scarves and flags from scores of clubs were draped on the gates outside the Leppings Lane terrace, where 96 people had been killed and more than 700 injured. At Anfield, tributes covered half the ground in red.

I remember the press reaction to the disaster. I remember how some of the tabloids vilified the victims, I remember the debates over whether it was right to publish photographs in which you could see the life literally being squeezed from people.

I remember covering Lord Justice Taylor’s inquiry into the tragedy, which led eventually to all-seater stadiums and concluded that police had been wrong to open a gate to relieve crushing outside the ground, without diverting fans away from already packed central pens.

I remember covering the long campaign for “justice” by relatives of the victims and their outrage that – despite an official inquiry, an inquest, and high court appeals – no one was ever held accountable. The policeman supposedly in charge on the day was allowed to retire (on medical grounds) without facing disciplinary action.

And I remember an emotional Scouser calling a radio phone-in to point out the now dreadful irony in Bill Shankly’s famous tongue-in-cheek comment about football being more important than life and death.

On 15 April 1989, we realised it never had been, and never would be.

Hillsborough in pictures

Just not cricket

by Alan Tyers

The attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team is a sickening blow for the game – and for anyone who wants to live in a civilised world.

This is the saddest day for sport in some time. The country that gave cricket such treasures as Wasim and Waqar, big Inzy, Imran Khan and Hanif Mohammad will not host any cricket for the foreseeable future.

The death of six security men is a terrible thing; it is a blessing that none of the Sri Lankan players was killed or seriously injured.

But it is nonetheless a victory for terrorism. No cricket team will go there now, which is not only bad for sport, but bad for society. It was thought, naively as it turns out, that even these terrorists would regard targeting sporting ambassadors as beyond the pale.

What can decent people do in the face of opponents so mad, evil and deluded that they would seek to murder a cricket team?

It is impossible to divine any rational motive for it. Hopefully the perpetrators will be caught – but to what end? Doubtless there are other maniacs to take their place.

A nation of sissies

by Greg McDonald

The FA’s plan to introduce a “mercy rule” to football, preventing humiliating defeats by ending games when a side goes nine goals behind, is an obscene pandering to a sissy culture that won’t accept the fundamental fact that you can’t always win in life.

A society in which nobody can be seen to fail not only devalues success – for example, in increasingly meaningless school exams – but it also fails to prepare kids for life’s more serious blows. Something Paul Morrison, the Devon FA chief executive, tacitly concedes when he says budding footballers on the end of a 10-0 defeat are "more vulnerable these days".

But maybe the FA is right, and mercy rules should be introduced in other sports too – how about a rule for the 2012 Olympics that if swimmer Michael Phelps looks like winning more than five gold medals again we call off the Men’s Butterfly, fill the pool with inflatable slides and have an aqua-disco to make the losers feel better?

And why stop at sport? I suggest the staff at the Department for Health and Safety re-record Frank Sinatra’s 1966 hit 'That’s Life!' with a new chorus: “That’s life – that’s what all the people say! You’re riding high in April – let down gently in May, and there’s a form you can fill in to claim tax credits against any lingering dissatisfaction you may have about the experience.”

Most of us look back at our defeats, recall crying at the time and, having emerged stronger for the experience, can laugh today – we shouldn’t deny a new generation the lesson that there’s no mercy rule in life.

In the meantime, if you wish to leave a negative comment about this blog please stop after nine words in case you injure my poor little feelings.

Twenty20 for… nothing

By Alan Tyers

Anything the players can cock up on the pitch, the administrators can cock up worse off it.

Just a week on from the team being bowled out for 51 by the West Indies, the English Cricket Board has, in the players’ parlance, “come to the party” as it emerges that Sir Allen Stanford, the man the ECB fawned over so shamelessly, might be on a bit of a sticky wicket of his own.

Giles Clarke, the ECB’s chairman, is naturally stressing that the Board did everything possible to ensure Sir Allen’s credentials when he started offering them large sums of money in exchange for England playing in a variety of Mickey Mouse competitions with no sporting merit.

As far as one can tell, their investigations seemed to be more along the lines of, “can he pay us all the lovely money?” rather than, “where is it all coming from?”.

Fair enough, up to a point: the ECB is a cricketing body, not the American Federal Government, which has some much more searching questions about the provenance of his billions.

But the ECB would have done well to heed the simple adage, “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is…” A classic combination of greed and credulousness that would not shame an investment bank.

Bring back public service sportcasting

By Greg McDonald

Millions watching last night’s FA Cup derby between Everton and Liverpool saw ITV make an inexplicable goal-missing blunder, which should prompt a long overdue change in our attitude to televised sport.

By missing the only goal of a two-hour encounter by cutting to unscheduled adverts during the dying minutes in many regions, ITV made the best possible argument for our national sports being shown free and uninterrupted on the BBC.

Unlike American football fans, for whom sport is the bits between the Coke ads, British football fans pay a license fee to the Beeb, and it’s time we demanded our money’s worth.

National sports like football, cricket and tennis owe their success not to commercial channels or a few greedy stars, but to hundreds of years of communal culture in which rules have developed, techniques have evolved, fitness has advanced, and a unique character has emerged as one generation inspires the next.

We whine that not enough of our kids want to play sport – but it’s hard to be inspired by Steven Gerrard when he only plays on Setanta at the Dog and Duck and under-18s aren’t allowed in.

It’s time we – the kids especially – all got our sports back, particularly since the tedious old argument that the BBC shows too much sport is long out of date in a digital age of vastly increased choice.

Sport is part of our national culture and common heritage. Last night’s ITV bungle was mere incompetence – the wider acquisition and exploitation of our common culture is inexcusable.