Among the Thugs

by Bill Buford

  The now-there-are-buses story was published on a Wednesday—the feared England-Holland match was on the following Saturday—and the Guardian was now running three stories a day. Everything was covered: getting a drink when alcohol was banned, the woman running the press conferences, the members of the press themselves, plus even more stories about the living conditions. Amid all these many stories, a pattern was emerging, and it was this: nothing was happening. Each day, I picked up my morning paper and straightaway turned to see what the Guardian’s correspondent had discovered, which was, invariably, a new way of writing about the fact there was nothing to discover. Two days before the England-Holland match, I had the impression that the Guardian correspondent was starting to tire. He was starting to get bored. And can you blame him? Every day was the same. Every afternoon he was back in his hot hotel room, phoning his editor in London, admitting that he had nothing to say; the editor then reminding him that he had been removed from the paper to sit in Cagliari and write about what he saw: space in the paper had been allocated; it was not possible that he would have nothing to say. In seven days, the Guardian ran 471 column inches devoted to football supporters—nearly forty feet of reports that said: there is nothing to report. The cost incurred by the Guardian—keeping a man on the island; plus a photographer; plus another journalist, by now roving the mainland, hoping to find something there; plus one based in Rome—is negligible compared to what the television companies were spending. It was an expensive business, reporting nothing, and you could see why journalists and the television presenters had to report it as interestingly as they possibly could: they had to report nothing as if it were something after all.

  And then the thought occurred to me: if so much was being spent on what was happening in Sardinia, then despite the appearance that nothing was happening, it was possible that something might happen after all. By virtue of the investment, something was bound to come from nothing. Or so I concluded. Because on the day before the Holland match, I found that I had stopped reading the Guardian. I was in the seat of airplane bound for the island of Sardinia. I was going to the World Cup: it was essential, I had decided; something was going to happen and I didn’t want to miss it.

  I GOT INTO Cagliari at about eight in the evening; had a drink at a bar; visited the main square to watch a small group of Chelsea supporters performing for a large group of reporters and television cameramen; noticed that they were surrounded by an even larger group of armed police and soldiers—many driving round the square in tanks; decided, after four minutes, that I had seen more than I needed to see; had a drink at a bar; cursed audibly for not being at home reading the Guardian; had a drink at another bar; asked a taxi-driver to take me to my hotel. The taxi-driver couldn’t believe his luck; my hotel was fifty miles away.

  The next day there was only one route into the city—all others had been closed by the police—and it was a long, out-of-the-way route that passed through three road-blocks, each manned by a law enforcement agency whose members were dressed in pretty white cotton safari suits and white colonial hard helmets—the kind made for the tropical heat. They were also wearing a matching belt, holster and gun—all white. I was driven into town by one of the hotel cars and we were stopped twice. I was frisked. I had three pens, and each one was taken apart. I have contact lenses, and each time my interrogator insisted on opening my plastic lens case. I was wearing shorts, trainers and a cotton shirt, and I looked, I would realize later, like any other England supporter.

  We made our way to the city centre, and I was dropped off by the railway station.

  It was four o’clock—five hours before the match—when I reached the Piazza Matteotti, the square by the railway station and the port, and they all were there. I had learned that two thousand tickets had been sold, but twice that number must have been at the Piazza—another two thousand, therefore, without tickets, although I soon discovered that the place was filled with touts having to sell off seats at below face value.

  It was a memorable sight. So, I thought: This is what all the press coverage has been about.

  The supporters had been at the square for several hours. Many had been in Sardinia for a week, stuck in a dusty campsite with little running water and no change of clothing. They were sunburnt and tired. They smelled. They were very quiet. There was no singing or shouting or chanting: the only sound was the noise of the traffic. Several hundred supporters were sitting, tightly packed, on a concrete platform by the taxi rank, where they had clearly been sitting, tightly packed, for many hours. They were bored. They weren’t talking to each other; they weren’t sleeping. They sat, arms wrapped around their knees. The day was muggy.

  I went inside the railway station. The bar, like every bar, was not selling alcohol, and there were long queues for mineral water. Hundreds of supporters were sitting on the concrete floor of the station—and along the train platforms. They, too, were staring straight ahead, dully, saying nothing. I don’t think I had ever seen so many English males, between the ages of eighteen and thirty, so quiet and so still. And then the thought occurred to me: I had never seen so many English males sober. This was the largest gathering of sober English males I had seen in my life.

  English football, I thought, has come to this.

  In Britain, fifteen million people would watch the match on television—a quarter of the population, a staggeringly popular manifestation of popular culture. It was an important match; England’s progress towards the World Cup depended on the performance tonight. Sardinia was only ninety minutes from London by plane; at any other time in the history of English football, thousands would have shown up on the day, but those thousands would not be appearing. Everybody knew what the supporters were going to be subjected to.

  I wandered back out to the square, in time to see a procession of ambulances. They went by slowly and drove on down the Via Roma towards the football stadium. The ambulances were new—shiny, bright, no dents or chips in the paintwork—and there was an element of pride involved in the display of them. Two lines of armoured personnel carriers came up next. Like the ambulances, the armoured personnel-carriers were formally arranged in pairs. It was only then that I realized that I was watching a parade. A number of khaki buses were next, filled with policemen in riot helmets, their visors pulled down over their faces: mean and nasty. The khaki buses passed, and behind them were more buses, windowless ones: in case the four thousand English supporters, currently senseless with boredom, suddenly had to be arrested en masse. It had been meticulously thought out—soldiers armed with machine-guns were next—but I wondered for whom this display was intended. It had no impact on the supporters. They hadn’t moved and were staring at their feet. They were bored—unspeakably bored.

  In front of the bus station was a gathering of about fifty police, huddled tightly in a circle, pressed together, hands on the shoulders of whomever was in front. It was a pep talk—the kind you see on the sidelines before an American football game. All this preparation and the big game was but moments away. The real match was not inside the stadium; it was here in the streets outside it. This was where you found the crowd; the press, the television cameras, the audience.

  I returned to the railway station. I had spotted a supporter I recognized from the night before. He had long, woolly sideburns—the shape was distinctly lamb-chops—with a tiny door-knob chin poking through. He was not young. He was at least thirty-five, my age, but he looked older. Perhaps he was forty. He had a creased old-man’s face with furrows across his forehead and wrinkles around the corners of his eyes.

  I introduced myself, adding tentatively that I was writing about football supporters. Journalists were not popular figures in Cagliari.

  ‘Six o’clock,’ he said. It wasn’t a reply or a greeting; I’m not sure what it was: a declaration perhaps. He then repeated it, looking straight at me. ‘Six o’clock.’ He said this slowly, as if I didn’t speak English.

  ‘Six o’clock,’ I said.

  ‘Six o’c
lock,’ he said, dead pan, and waited as if I was expected to answer.

  I tried to think of something to say. ‘Six o’clock?’ I asked, finally.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Six o’clock. Pass it on.’

  A group of supporters walked past; he stopped them. ‘Six o’clock, mates. Got it?’ He said this in an intense whisper. ‘Pass it on.’

  They nodded.

  Others appeared and were stopped. Old Man Mutton-chops was in the middle of the railway station, in everyone’s path. The exchange was repeated.

  A group of eight or nine lads wanted confirmation.

  ‘So it’s six o’clock?’ one of them asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Six o’clock. Pass it on.’

  They were animated by the idea of six o’clock—you could see it in their eyes. They did not have Mutton-chops’s cool. I was growing interested by the prospect as well.

  There was a lull and I was able to reclaim Mutton-chops’s attention. I mentioned that he and I had been drinking at the same bar the night before. It was a way of re-introducing myself—my first attempt had had so little impact. It was always a slightly nervous moment introducing yourself to one of them. In the event, Mutton-chops had already sized me up. I was a journalist—that was what mattered. Mutton-chops, I would discover, took public relations very seriously.

  I asked him about the significance of six o’clock.

  ‘That’s when we march,’ he said casually—still very cool—and then theatrically grabbed someone else by the shoulder, urging the news upon him: ‘Six o’clock.’ And then, hissing: ‘Pass it on.’

  Others continued to cross and re-cross Mutton-chops’s spot and were all brought up to date about the march. It seemed to me that in the short time I had been standing there, hundreds of people had probably learned about it: the march. That was the word that everyone was using: the march.

  Mutton-chops explained what would happen. On the dot of six, the lads, all four thousand, would set out and head down the Via Roma, walking against the traffic, in such numbers that the city would come to a standstill. That would be the march. ‘Then they’ll know we’re here,’ he said. He repeated the sentence, with emphasis: ‘Then they’ll really knew we’re here.’

  Stopping traffic was a familiar supporters’ tactic—crossing the street en masse so that every vehicle comes to a halt—and this march sounded like it would be the same thing but on a grander scale. The supporters wanted, at last, to behave like a crowd, and a march offered itself as a way in which numbers can show off the power of numbers. Even so, I had never heard anyone describe this sort of thing as a march. This was new. A march sounded so purposeful. Protesters march. Demonstrators march. Armies march. But football supporters?

  I asked Mutton-chops about the march; I was interested in the use of the word.

  ‘It will be fuckin’ brilliant,’ he said. ‘We will take over the fuckin’ city,’ he said. Then he added, as though for clarification: ‘They won’t be able to fuckin’ stop us now.’

  Mutton-chops was trying to prove something to me. He wanted me to understand that this was my lucky day. I was a journalist; I had now met Mutton-chops. I was privileged. I must admit that I did not feel particularly privileged. But he was not to be deterred.

  What he wanted, I suddenly understood, was for me to pull out my notebook. He wanted to see me writing notes—particularly his name. It was his name in print that he was hoping for.

  He pulled out a cutting from his back pocket. He did this carefully, looking over his shoulder. The clipping was from the Daily Express. It was today’s edition, Saturday, 16 June, and between the headline (‘GENERALS OF HATE’) and the sub-heading (‘SOCCER THUGS SHOW UP FOR BATTLE’) was a photograph of Mutton-chops.

  I was impressed—not by the story, which was like every other one I had been reading for the last two weeks—but by the existence of the picture itself. It had been taken the night before—it was the spectacle of the supporters surrounded by the reporters and television cameramen that I had witnessed on arriving—and yet, such were the efficiencies of the modern newspaper when it sets out to cover an event of (such obvious) importance, that it was here, the very next day, in the hands of its subject.

  Mutton-chops told me why the article was meaningful. It was about the one hundred most wanted hooligans in Britain—the Football Intelligence Unit’s danger list—and the authorities’ inability to keep them out of Italy. He read aloud the crucial passage:

  The most dangerous soccer hooligans in Britain have slipped into Sardinia and are planning a showdown with their Dutch rivals. The hard-core hooligans, many with names on the British Football Intelligence Unit’s top 100 list of convicted soccer thugs, have gone to extraordinary lengths to beat the tight security . . . Some have dyed their hair while others have even changed their names by deed poll to get new passports.

  Mutton-chops was shocked at the incompetence, never more manifest than in this very photograph: Mutton-chops himself, he said, was on the list of one hundred.

  This was offered as a revelation. A confidence had been extended to me, something private and dangerous. Mutton-chops regarded it as a matter of great prestige to be on the list of one hundred—and of even greater prestige then to slip into Italy. The operation to keep the ‘one hundred’ out of the country was extremely sophisticated. Undercover police, even spies, were said to be everywhere. You could never check into a hotel because, on giving up your passport, you would be detected and thrown out of the country within hours. You must be careful about what you said on the phone; it was bugged. Mutton-chops himself made a point of wearing dark glasses during the day and, despite the heat, a large woollen hat. You just couldn’t take any chances.

  Mid-way through his account, he stopped. ‘Shouldn’t you be taking notes?’

  I said nothing. I stared. I couldn’t believe that I was subjecting myself to this thing again, that I had once found it interesting.

  But he wasn’t to be stopped. He named the people on the list who had got into Italy. I wondered how he knew. Had the list been published? He carried on—it would seem that almost everyone had got through—each name a notorious trouble-maker, I’m sure, except for the fact that, even though I was nodding knowingly, I did not recognize any of them. And the more trouble-makers he named, the more I had to fight back a profound and potentially devastating despair: perhaps I had not done enough research. My insatiable anxieties rose up in me like a sickness. Did I need to do more work? Should I spend the remaining days of the World Cup in the company of this short, fuzzy old man, drinking cans of his warm lager, sleeping at his filthy campsite, foregoing all those little luxuries—bathing, cooked food, flushing toilets—that I had now grown so accustomed to, while pretending to be interested in the same stories that I had heard over and over for the last eight years?

  Weakly I commented that there did not seem to be many from Manchester.

  ‘No, they’re not big on the international matches,’ he said, which was a consolation.

  And, I said, there did not seem to be many from West Ham.

  ‘No, there is crisis in the leadership at the moment,’ he said, which was a further consolation, until finally, cheering me up considerably, he mentioned two people I had heard of: Stephen Hickmott (‘Hicky!’ I exclaimed, as if he were a long-lost friend) and Terry Last (‘Not the Terry Last,’ I cried, bubbling now with enthusiasm).

  I hadn’t known that they were out of prison, I declared, cheerfully.

  Of course, of course, Mutton-chops said, almost dismissively. Hickmott and Last, he said, had both got out early for good behaviour. He showed me Stephen Hickmott’s card—he was in the roofing business with his brother in Tunbridge Wells—and said that Terry Last wouldn’t be showing up until fifteen minutes before the match because of the undercover policing.

  And then he added, sententiously: But they’re not really important now, if you see what I mean.

  I said I didn’t, but before he could explai
n we were interrupted. A Canadian had appeared.

  Mutton-chops had told me about the Canadian—it was evidence of the increasing international appeal of English crowd violence. Apparently, there were many foreigners—three Canadians, two Germans and a Swede.

  Mutton-chops introduced us, but the Canadian wasn’t interested in me. He was troubled by something.

  First, he wanted to know, should he bring his guitar?

  Mutton-chops did not understand. ‘Your guitar?’

  The Canadian wanted to know if there would be singing, and, if so, he would bring his guitar. ‘Especially with all the television people here.’

  Mutton-chops suggested that the Canadian should leave the guitar behind unless he wanted to use it as a weapon. He laughed knowingly and winked at me.

  The Canadian did not appreciate the implications of the statement. No matter; he had other questions. There was dinner, for instance. When would they be eating dinner?

  Mutton-chops again did not understand the question. Neither did I.

  Dinner?

  Yes. The Canadian was concerned. ‘If the march starts at six, and the game is three hours later, it doesn’t leave much time for dinner, does it?’ The Canadian had assumed that, since Mutton-chops was organizing the march, he would know when they were scheduled to eat.

  Mutton-chops smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand and looked at the Canadian in a way that suggested the Canadian’s life was in danger. I had the distinct feeling that Mutton-chops’s inclination was to suck the young Canadian’s head off his neck and swallow it. I don’t know why this particular image suggested itself, but it was very strong.

  The Canadian, meanwhile, continued to express his anxieties about his meal: it was just inconceivable that the schedule did not leave any time to eat; it showed bad planning.

  ‘It is,’ Man Mutton-chops said in a low intense voice, ‘not that kind of march.’ He stared. And then he said: ‘You stupid fuckin’ cunt.’