by Bill Buford
The area was slowly filling up with members of the press.
When the ambulances finally showed up, they did not include any of the attractive modern models that I had seen on parade. Those, along with most of the men and the arms and the machine-guns and the high-tech bazookas that I would see later, were reserved for the ground. I wasn’t sure if that was because more trouble was expected there—we still hadn’t seen a Dutch supporter, after all—or because that was where the television crews were waiting. The ambulances that were arriving now were not ambulances in fact, although the people inside wore white coats. They looked like family holiday campers, mom and pop nursing services, and three or four supporters would be packed inside each. I saw five supporters put into one.
As I watched, still out of breath, leaning against a car, a journalist from Finland came up to me. He was very angry. With great indignation he told me that ‘That’ was unbelievably stupid.
I was intrigued by his indignation, although I didn’t understand why he had picked me out to express it to. I thought perhaps he had seen me beaten up, but he hadn’t.
I agreed with him, though. It had all been very stupid.
But he wasn’t about to let it rest. He wasn’t satisfied that I had understood him. The whole thing, he said as though for clarification, the whole thing was unbelievably stupid. He swung his arm through the air, so as to take in everything: Everything was very stupid.
You don’t mean only the England supporters? I asked.
No, everything, he said, still very angry, and becoming impatient. Everything, everything, everything.
And then I realized that he might well have seen the whole thing—that he might have been one of the few journalists who had not been kept back. You mean everything? I asked.
Everything, he said.
You mean everything? I repeated the word for emphasis. You mean the police and the supporters and that silly march at the beginning?
Everything, he said. It disgusts me.
And the press, I continued, realizing that he really had taken in the whole thing. You mean the waste and injuries and the pain—I was excited by having discovered an ally. The nationalism and the machismo. You really mean, everything: that this very stupid thing should never have happened.
I have never, he said, seen something so stupid in my life.
I looked at him and liked him very much. No, I said. Nor have I.
I got to the airport at five the next morning—determined to wait in every queue to get on a flight, even though I had been told that there were so many journalists in Cagliari that every flight off the island was booked up for the next three days. Photographers—their equipment strapped to their bodies—were asleep on the floors. There were several journalists on the luggage conveyor belt. There was no place to sit. But, somehow, I got a flight and got home and followed the progress of the England team on television.
Despite a disappointing start, the team played well and, with each new match, seemed to improve. There was trouble—247 supporters were rounded up outside a bar in the resort town of Rimini—but many supporters claimed that the trouble had been provoked by the Italian police. There were more fights later, some violent. An English fan was killed when he was hit by a car after running away from two Italians who had been chasing him. There was a stabbing. And then the inconceivable suggested itself: the England team had reached the quarter-finals against Cameroon. If England won, it would go on to the semi-finals, which, in all likelihood, would be against Germany, the country whose supporters were as violent as England’s. And worse: the game would be played in Turin.
Attention given to the hooligans inglesi increased. More reporters were sent to Italy—more television crews, more photographers. Was it possible to send more? I spoke to a friend, a journalist, who was already in Turin. It was impossible, he said, to get a room. It was like a presidential campaign or a war or an international disaster: everyone was there.
In the morning, I bought all the papers—ten, fifteen, more—in all the European languages. I was doing it again; I could see that I was doing it again. I read that the mayor of Turin had appealed to the World Cup authorities to play this semi-final in another city—anywhere but Turin. ‘Please save us from these fans,’ she was quoted as saying. There was another article: the businessmen of Turin had joined the mayor in her plea: ‘Please save us from these fans.’ There was another article: the flags of Cameroon had been displayed in Turin; nobody wanted England to win.
England won. The England supporters would be returning to Turin.
I booked myself a ticket to Turin. But then, the day before I was meant to leave, I was depressed—a heavy, heavy depression. It was the prospect of the drink and the crudeness and the bellies and the tattoos. It was the idea of making conversation with all those little shits. It was the look that I anticipated seeing in the eyes of the Italian shopkeepers and of the fathers and of the women dressed in black. It was the thought that every member of that city will have watched that one video, over and over again, the European Cup, Juventus and Liverpool, and thirty-nine Italians dead—dead because of a country of little shits.
My flight was at six in the morning. I stared at myself in the mirror. I was perspiring. My flesh was grey and had the texture of cardboard, with beads of sweat across my forehead. I looked at myself—it was mid-summer and the bathroom was already filled with light. I continued staring for ten or fifteen minutes. The sweat started building up along my eyebrows and then poured down into my eyes. My shirt was drenched. I felt sick.
I missed my flight.
There was another one in two hours. I phoned my friend in Turin. I woke him up—there had been violence until three in the morning the night before.
Yes, he said, there had been trouble. There was a lot of tension.
No, he said, it was not the Germans. It was the Italians.
Yes, he said, there would be trouble that night. Why didn’t I come out?
No, I decided, finally. No, I wouldn’t come out. I couldn’t. It was not possible.
That night there wasn’t much trouble. Some fights at the railway station and some later at the square. The real violence was in England, when, after the national team lost, lads across the country spilled out of the pubs, angry and full of feeling—the crude feeling of their miserable nationalism. They were drunk. Eleven o’clock at night and England had lost: lad culture on the loose. There were fights in Harlow Town and Stevenage and Norwich. There were fights in the Midlands. There were fights in the suburbs of London—Croydon and Finchley and Acton. There were fights three blocks from where I live in Cambridge. The familiar litany: the shop windows were broken; property destroyed. Arson. German cars were vandalized—the windscreens, the mirrors, the doors. A German boy was stabbed and killed.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Two citations, one describing the violence at Hampden Park in 1909 and the other describing the Stretford End in 1974, are from The Roots of Football Hooliganism: An Historical and Sociological Study (1988) by Eric Dunning, Patrick Murphy and John Williams. The discussion of the relationship between LeBon and Mussolini is to be found in R.A. Nye’s The Origins of Crowd Psychology (1975). In addition to the obvious texts, two books proved especially useful, and I am grateful to their authors: Geoffrey Pearson’s Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (1983) and George Rudé’s The Crowd in History, 1730-1848 (revised edition, 1981). I would like to thank those who have read part or all of the manuscript: Tim Adams, David Hooper, Eric Jacobs, Derek Johns, Brian MacArthur of the Sunday Times, Richard Rayner, Salman Rushdie, Bob Tashman and John Williams. Good editors—rare, undervalued, wonderful creatures—are so hard to come by that I feel, especially privileged to have had three: Edwin Barber at W.W. Norton in New York, Ursula Doyle at Granta and the patient, inspiring, steadfastly encouraging Dan Franklin at Secker & Warburg.
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Epub ISBN 9781446439654
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Reissued by Arrow Books 2001
Copyright © Bill Buford 1991
Bill Buford has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in Great Britain in 1991 by Martin Secker & Warburg
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ISBN 9780099416340