Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

  Meanwhile, Mick had started to act up. I don’t know what had happened to his eight-litre bottle of red wine. I fear that he had drunk it. He was on to lager now, ordinary can size.

  Once outside, Mick had thought it would be amusing if he made a dash for the runway. He sprinted—a sight in itself—into the open territory of the landing-strip, and the airport was thrown into a panic. Someone started shouting in Italian, and ten or twelve soldiers bolted across the tarmac in pursuit of one very large English supporter in a state of dangerous intoxication. Mick stopped just short of the runway and waited for the soldiers, giggling and hooting and pointing his finger. He thought it would be more amusing if, once the soldiers had caught up with him, he then ran off in another direction. More panic, more urgent shouting, as Mick—from our vantage place by the terminal, a large dot in the distance—ran round in circles frantically chased by smaller dots in uniforms. When I returned to England, Mick was to send me a package of photographs that someone had taken after he had been apprehended by the soldiers. ‘I don’t remember,’ Mick wrote, ‘any of it happening. Isn’t that funny?’

  On reflection, I can see now that there had been more people there than expected. I had recognized some of the nine-year-olds from the night before, and I did not think that they had been on the plane from London. I had spotted Roy, who I knew had not been on the plane. But I didn’t think much of it. I had other concerns.

  My first one had been retrieving my passport. One of the younger supporters had been staring at it uncomprehendingly when it, along with his own British passport, was inexplicably delivered into his hands. The reason why it was in his possession and not mine was because of the perplexing pandemonium at passport control.

  Once the supporters had passed into the terminal from the buses outside, they all made straight for the immigration desks. They were weaving and bobbing and swaying from side to side from the drink, but were nevertheless so purposeful that it made me think that the flight was about to leave. But this was not likely: we were early, and, besides, the flight was a charter: what was the hurry? There were cries for order, but they were ignored. I heard the voice of Mr Wicks, rising above the clamour, begging us to form a queue. Two officials were in charge of immigration and passports, and the normal procedure was to pass one by one between their desks. The supporters passed through them, but it wasn’t one by one: it was in packs of twenty. Turin is not a busy airport, and the two men would have never been confronted by such a crowd. There was a terrible crush, with people squeezing through sideways and pressed on top of each other. I saw younger supporters crawling on the floor on their hands and knees. One slipped through by going underneath one of the desks.

  Once on the other side of passport control, the surge continued: the pack headed straight for the gate. The attendants collecting tickets for Monarch Airways were less protected than the immigration officers, who had desks to hide behind.

  The stewardess standing in the door of the plane was next.

  It was only when I found my place—suspecting that I was one of the few passengers sober enough to discover the correspondence between the number printed on his boarding pass and the one displayed above his seat—that I understood what had happened. It wasn’t simply the case that, once again, English supporters were behaving in a drunk and disorderly way. They were drunk and disorderly for a reason: I had just seen what it was to be on the jib.

  I reached down to put my bag away and noticed that there was no room for it: there were two feet. I bent down and confirmed what I felt: there were indeed two feet. The two feet were attached to two legs, which were, as I bent down a little further, attached to an ordinary human body at the far end of which was a human face, a familiar one, that; with his forefinger brought to his lips, was telling me not to say anything.

  I looked around the plane, which had grown exceptionally quiet: not, I then appreciated, because it was about take off but because it was about to take off filled with stowaways: they were all crushed underneath the window seats. I didn’t know how many there were. I started counting them—I got up to ten—when I realized who was in the seat next to me.

  It was Roy, elegantly dressed in a light-blue cotton suit, a white waistcoat, Italian canvas shoes and a diamond ear-ring. I thought afterwards that I should have asked him how he got on the airplane—had he managed to get the Mercedes on board as well?—but I was so taken aback by the fact that he was sitting next to me that I couldn’t think of anything to say. For the duration of the flight I couldn’t think of anything to say. My luck, it seemed, had changed, and Roy, who couldn’t bear to look at me before, had also concluded, I learned later, that I wasn’t such a bad sort after all. Roy, too, had decided that I was a good geezer.

  Matters on the flight, meanwhile, had become strange. The stewardesses were not supplying anyone with food or drink because they were refusing to walk down the aisle: the last one who tried was still shaken up following a wrestling match she had with Mick, who was now on to vodka, drinking it from a large two-litre, duty-free bottle. The wrestling match had ended up with the stewardess suddenly disappearing behind one of the seats, with her feet, rising above the head-rest, kicking in the air.

  Matters had also become confused because there were so many people. Now that the plane had become airborne, the feet I found underneath my seat were no longer there, and the young man to whom they were attached was looking around for a place to sit. He was joined in this by many others. He explained to me that, with no way of getting back to England, he and his friends had decided to join us on our return flight. Although they didn’t have a ticket or a boarding pass, they had succeeded in sneaking on board, but then realized that as the flight was fully booked they would have to hide underneath the seats. It seemed fairly ingenious, but it raised doubts in my mind about the measures taken to stop hijackers. I was unable to express these doubts because by this time Roy was creating a bit of a stir. He had emptied one of his trouser pockets. In it there were three things: a large roll of twenty-pound notes; a key-ring, with a small silver knife attached to it (was the Mercedes on board after all?); and a brown envelope containing a large quantity of white powder that Roy proceeded to chop up. Many people had gathered around, with whom Roy, being a generous fellow, was sharing his white powder, now disappearing rapidly up one of the tightly-rolled twenty-pound notes.

  When our plane was about to land, there was another problem. No one, from that wayward group often, really wanted to climb back underneath the seats, and thus, with a cavalier disregard for international flight regulations, many people were wandering up and down the aisle unable to find a place to sit as the plane descended. One person who was not wandering up and down the aisle was Mick. And that was because he was lying in the middle of it. Mick had abandoned his duty-free bottle of vodka, because Mick had become copiously ill.

  Mick’s stomach was not made of bricks after all.

  I got back to London at about eight o’clock that night, feeling tired and mean and nasty. I was gritty and hungover, and my mind was full of images from the night before. I was in a hurry to get home.

  The escalator at the Marble Arch Underground station was not working. My train left in minutes. I bolted down the steps of the station; the stairs were long and steep. There was an old man and woman in front of me. The old woman was helping the man, but they were having trouble negotiating the stairs, taking one gentle step at a time. Both had canes. But together they were also taking up the width of the staircase. I was in a hurry. I started muttering underneath my breath: ‘Get on with it.’ And still they proceeded, step by step, frail and careful. I said it again: ‘Get on with it.’ And then something snapped and I shoved them forcefully aside, pushing them sideways with the flat part of my hand. I shot past and then looked back up at them.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said. ‘Fuck off, you old cunts.’

  Juventus went on to win the final of the Cup-Winners Cup, beating the Porto Football Club two-one at the stadium in Basle in Switz
erland. The next season, Juventus was in the European Cup. In the first round, it played the Finnish team Ilves-Kissat and won six-nil. It won the second round, and in the quarter-finals played Sparta Prague: again a victory for Juventus. The semi-final was against Bordeaux. It wasn’t until the final that Juventus played an English team again, the first time since Manchester United visited Turin. The team was Liverpool; the stadium was Heysel in Brussels. Juventus won one-nil; the goal was a penalty kick. Before the match began, thirty-nine people died; six hundred were injured.

  SUNDERLAND

  The mob gathering round Lord Mansfield’s house had called on those within to open the door, and receiving no reply . . . forced an entrance . . . they then began to demolish the house with great fury . . . while they were howling and exulting . . . a troop of soldiers, with a magistrate among them, came up, and being too late (for the mischief was by that time done), began to disperse the crowd. The Riot Act being read, and the crowd still resisting, the soldiers received orders to fire, and levelling their muskets, shot dead at the first discharge six men and a woman, and wounded many persons; . . . daunted by the shrieks and tumult, the crowd began to disperse, and the soldiers went away, leaving the killed and wounded on the ground—which they had no sooner done than the rioters came back again, and taking up the dead bodies, and the wounded people, formed into a rude procession, having the bodies in the front . . . in this order they paraded off with a horrible merriment; fixing weapons in the dead men’s hands to make them look as if alive . . .

  Charles Dickens

  Barnaby Rudge (1840)

  SUPERINTENDENT R. MCALLISTER of the Wearside Police Station in Sunderland was perfectly happy to speak to me about crowd trouble—it was a routine part of his job—but, on seeing that I was American, he was more interested in learning about crowd behaviour at football games in the United States.

  ‘Am I mistaken, Mr Buford,’ he asked, ‘or is it the case that there is seating for everyone at every American football match?’ He had heard this was so.

  I assured him that it was the case.

  ‘I see,’ Superintendent R. McAllister said, and thought.

  ‘Everyone?’ he asked again.

  ‘Everyone,’ I said.

  ‘I see,’ he said, and thought. You could see that he was trying to picture thousands of versions of Roker Park, Sunderland’s football stadium—all with seats.

  Another question occurred to him.

  ‘Am I mistaken, Mr Buford, or is it the case in American football that, although the play lasts for only sixty minutes, the matches themselves can last for two or even three hours?’

  I assured him that such was the case.

  ‘I see,’ he said, and thought. Superintendent R. McAllister was a slow man, but a careful one. He wanted to make sure he got things right.

  ‘And am I mistaken, Mr Buford,’ he continued, ‘or is it the case that, even though the matches might last two or even three hours there is no crowd trouble?’

  Crowd trouble, I assured him, was a very rare thing.

  He shook his head, uncomprehending. It was all a bit much: thousands of seats, a violent game that lasts for several hours and no crowd trouble.

  ‘Am I mistaken, Mr Buford,’ the Superintendent continued, ‘or is it the case that there are also very few policemen in the grounds of these American football matches?’

  Very few, I assured him.

  ‘And yet,’ Superintendent McAllister continued, ‘there is no trouble?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘None?’ he repeated, not disbelieving me exactly, but wanting some kind of proof—some statistics perhaps.

  ‘None,’ I said.

  Superintendent McAllister shook his head. He said nothing for a very long time. He was thinking.

  MANCHESTER

  The Stretford End . . . is a kind of academy of violence, where promising young fans can study the arts of intimidation. This season the club installed a metal barrier between the fans and the ground. It resembles the sort of cage, formidable and expensive, that is put up by a zoo to contain the animals it needs but slightly fears. Its effect has been to make the Stretford terraces even more exclusive and to turn the occupants into an elite.

  Observer, 1 December 1974

  THE WEEKEND AFTER my visit to Turin, I took the train to Manchester. Manchester United was at home to West Ham, the East London team, and I had been told to come up for the match. I had been accepted. I had been accepted for the simple reason that I had travelled with the supporters to Italy and had been with them when it had ‘gone off’. I had witnessed an experience of great intensity and—like the other supporters returning to tell stories to the friends who had remained behind—I was among the privileged who could say that he had been there.

  I was told to show up around mid-morning at the Brunswick, a pub near Manchester’s Piccadilly station, but if I was late then I was to go on to Yates’s Wine Lodge on the High Street. By one, everyone would be at Yates’s.

  I arrived just before noon and got to the Brunswick in time to meet some of the people I had heard about. There was Teapot and Berlin Red and One-Eyed Billy and Daft Donald. Daft Donald was the one who had tried to reach Turin but never got past Nice. Daft Donald showed me a canister of CS gas. He said that he always travelled with a canister of CS gas. It stuns them, he said, so that you can then take out their teeth without any resistance.

  I spotted a lad named Richard, whom I recognized from Turin. He was flicking through an envelope of photographs that he had picked up that morning from Boots, surrounded by four or five of his friends. They had stayed home; Richard had gone, although he told me later that, because he had gone without first getting permission from his boss, he had probably lost his job—assembly line work at a machine factory. The reason he could say only that he had ‘probably’ lost his job was because, three days later, he still hadn’t showed up for it. But for the moment it didn’t matter; he was a celebrity: he had been in Italy when it had ‘gone off’.

  For Richard, being one of the lads was the best thing a person could be. He became serious and a little sentimental when he spoke about it. The shape of his face changed; it seemed to soften and round out, and his eyebrows knitted up with feeling. ‘We look forward to Saturdays,’ he said, ‘all week long. It’s the most meaningful thing in our lives. It’s a religion, really. That’s how important it is to us. Saturday is our day of worship.’

  Richard wanted to explain to me what it meant to be a supporter of Manchester United. I didn’t know why at first—whether it was because I was an American and was thus ignorant about these things, or because I was the journalist who might put the record straight, or because I was the most recent member to be admitted into the group—but Richard wasn’t the only one. Other people went out of their way to do the same: they wanted me to understand. All day long people stopped me to illustrate, to define, to comment upon the condition of being one of the lads. I cannot remember meeting people so self-conscious about their status and so interested in how it was seen by others. They were members of something exclusive—a club, cult, firm, cultural phenomenon, whatever it might be called—and they valued its exclusivity. They were used to the fact that the world was interested in them and were accustomed to dealing with television and newspaper journalists in a way that few people, however educated in media matters, could hope to be. It was a perverse notion, but they believed that they were involved in an historical moment, that they were making history. And now that they didn’t have to hide from me that their thing was violence—now that the pretence of being a good supporter could be abandoned—they all wanted to talk about it.

  This put me in an awkward position. What was I meant to do with what people were telling me? I was uncomfortable with the idea of writing in my notebook in front of everybody. I knew that I couldn’t pull out a tape-recorder, that something so blatant would destroy the trust. So what did that make me? Was I the reporter or had I been genuinely admitted to the group? And if I
had been admitted, should I be explicit about the fact I would be writing about the very people who were befriending me? In retrospect, my confusion, that I was suddenly unsure of my role, was a symptom of the way a group of this sort works—the way it takes you in, proffers support and expects loyalty—and I resolved the matter in a simple way: I avoided it. I ended up excusing myself constantly to get into one of the stalls in the lavatory, where I then sat down and, secure in my privacy, scrawled down everything I had been told. I was being told so much that day that I was having to disappear with considerable regularity—there is only so much you can hold in your head—and I finally had to own up to having stomach problems.

  I re-emerged from one lavatory visit to discover a lad who looked exactly like Keith Richards. The likeness was uncanny. What’s more, it wasn’t Keith Richards at just any time of his life; it was Keith Richards during the worst time. The lad had the same long, leathery, lined face; the druggy offhand manner; the endless cigarettes; the dazed and exhausted appearance of sustained personal abuse. He, too, had been in Italy, but I didn’t remember seeing him there. That, he said, was because, through the whole match, he had sat at the bottom of the stairs with his head between his legs vomiting upon his feet. He showed me his boots, still caked with the dried splatterings of the horrors that, at one time, had been contained in his stomach.

  It would be, I offered, such a waste to clean them.

  The Keith Richards lookalike was disconcertingly self-aware. He knew what a journalist was hoping to find in him and that he provided it. He worked in a factory, making soap powder. ‘The perfect profile of a hooligan, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘He works all week at a boring job and can’t wait to get out on a Saturday afternoon.’