I don't know enough about French police to comment on them but to say the fault is solely with their lack of organisation is surely ignoring the yobs part in all of this and at the CL final?
Look at the policing in Euro ‘16. The city of Marseille was a war zone for several days, and when we played Russia, the Russian hooligans were able to enter the section of England supporters with no opposition from the police at all. The police in England prevent violence easily enough every weekend up and down the country.
Could argue that the yobs at the CL final were the French police... pepper spraying children, elderly and journalists without provocation. UEFA and the French authorities have already been proved to have been lying about 'fans turning up late' as there's plenty of journalists caught up in it who have corroborated that they were stuck there for hours and the majority of supporters behaved extremely well. I know a United fan who does European aways and he said he always finds that the police in France (Gendarme? mainly) are desperate for a scrap and try to provoke one. Aside from that it actually sounds similar to the Euros final last year where there wasn't enough of a perimeter or checks before the turnstiles to prevent those without tickets getting near the ground. Crazy that hundreds of locals were able to get right up to the turnstiles.
Could also point out that this was Liverpool's third CL final in 5 years and there were none of these issues in Kiev or Madrid.
This when you also consider that clip from the St Etienne match suggests it is a French police thing My brother has scathing words for the French police connected to when he went to a music festival there. They are apparently appalling (and far too heavy handed). I think he noted how stark the comparison is compared to Belgium
The French police have always had a reputation for brutality. Probably some residual memory that if they don't give them a whiff of grapeshot from the off, there will be barricades in the street and revolution in the air by the time the sun sets.
To be fair, the UK police, particularly from South Yorkshire, (Maggie's Militia) in the '80s were pretty brutal as witnessed by The Miner's Strike, The Battle of the Beanfield and ultimately Hillsborough.
I'm quite prepared to believe the stories about the French police and maybe in other European countries too. You often see news reports where demonstrations are quickly met with baton swinging police, water cannons and tear gas. But my point was if the St Etienne fans carry flares to the game and then throw them into the tunnel, then the fault cannot be solely with the police. As for the CL final, I'm also prepared to believe the French police acted inappropriately and then tried to cover it up but it's not inconceivable that stories about counterfeit tickets, people refusing to move away and climbing fences are also true. It's difficult to know exactly what happend because of the media love-in with Liverpool, their side of events is usually taken as the truth. Behaviour at past finals is a fair point (it certainly would be used against them if the behaviour had been poor) but only a small measure to what went on at Paris IMO. Just because they went off peacefully previously, doesn't really mean that at this final they would also be well behaved. Different people, different circumstances and admittedly different police.
I saw a comment elsewhere suggesting that because of Hillsborough it seems like we are now expected to automatically assume that the Liverpool fans are blameless. And that certainly seems to be the stance almost all of the British based media are taking on it. And that is nonsense. I’m not saying that they are solely or even mostly to blame. But they are not immune from criticism or even having the question asked
I certainly believe that it is possible that Liverpool fans turned up with fake tickets and that was a factor in there being delays at their end of the ground.
Nike have managed to design the most boring England shirt of all time. Nike are f*cking awful with kits these days.
Just the fact that this sort of thing happens so often in France. Nine games were abandoned in the first half of the 21/22 Ligue 1 season alone due to crowd disturbances. NINE! That to me suggests that the French police simply aren't doing enough. Any fan that seriously misbehaves in England, is picked up by CCTV, and punished accordingly. This acts as a massive deterrent to other potential troublemakers. As a result you never get games abandoned and so on. Of course you will get isolated incidents of chaotic fan behaviour in England. The final of the Euros being a good example. But, you can bet that the police/government in the UK would pull out all the stops to make sure any mistakes made would never happen again. To have NINE matches in France abandoned in just a few months, it's difficult to comprehend. The government there must be doing f*ck all to prevent it. And then of course, wait for the English to come over, and put all the blame on them. F*cking ridiculous.
Underatand what your saying here but problem, and I’ve said numerous times, is that refs rarely give fouls, let alone actual penalties, when a player doesn’t go down. How many penalties have you seen given where player is fouled but stays on his feet? Just doesn’t happen. However, not every foul forces you to fall over. We’ve all played the game and been fouled and not fallen over (happens every week in our 5a side on Astro, because no one wants to fall on that sand!) and you see it in middle of pitch where refs give fouls. But until refs start giving pens for those, players will always exaggerate contact (and I think that’s what your referring to here rather than diving). I think a dive would be no contact, where as the Huddersfield one, was clear contact and he exaggerated the contact and fall to highlight to the ref. It will take a lot of time for all that to filter to become the norm though.
Sorry I disagree with this - the media were caught up in it themselves which is why so many are corroborating the stories of fans. I'm sure there were a few fans that acted like dickheads but no more than usual at an event like this and it wasn't the cause of the issues. The authorities didn't react to the train strikes which meant almost all fans came via one route (rather than split across two) and a wholly inadequate ticket check: ^^^That was supposed to be sufficient for 20 thousand people and look at the size of the gap people were expected to squeeze through further back on the right hand side. This was abandoned after a while due to the bottleneck it had created and this meant that the fake tickets weren't filtered out as they should be and also allowed locals to get up to the gates. I'm not buying that there was 30/40k fake tickets. Where's the evidence for that many being turned away from the ground ko? Sounds like nonsense to me and an excuse for the authorities to pass blame on to them nasty English football fans again. We also know that genuine tickets were being claimed as fake so something clearly up there. Fans with genuine tickets were told to crawl under turnstiles too ffs - an absolute shambles. Madrid fans have reported issues with the scum that are French police too btw. Including that they were allowed to be robbed and assaulted freely by locals.
