The uglier side of today - The police were ****.

Saw the flares ( once again the stewards slipped up by letting them be brought into the ground ) but didn't see any being thrown. Heard 25 of our guys were arrested, will we miss them if they're banned?

 

In a word - No!

 

The fa should consider making Newcastle play behind closed doors

 

And you should be living behind locked doors with bars over the windows.

The trouble was no where near the ground.

Do not associate genuine Toon fans with these idiots

 

Thanks for your input.

 

Thanks for your input.

 

No doubt that the skunk biased north east media will try and put a big downer on any perceived bad behavior by a couple of Sunderland fans rather than the Skunks running riot after the game or the spanking they took on the pitch...

 

How do we end up with morons like this associating themselves with our club? It makes me sick to the stomach.

 

Look they are not football fans they are idiots who look for a fight every day of the week, it is just easy to hide behind the fact that there is a game on. It gives you the chance to be a coward and hide in the crowd.

Most of them will not have been at the game. All clubs have them, we do as well

 

This ^^^

 

Good post .

 

Well said!

 

One thing I always ask in such situations is has the police presence actually inspired these events, rather than prevented or limited it as planned? I don't seek to justify what those harvard intellectuals did, at all, but it seems to me the more police you have can be less of a deterrent and more of a challenge.

I've personally never seen anything so overtly aggressive as a mounted police horse pushing it's way through people before a game, like we're in Planet of the Apes, and that's before any violence kicks off... Would those drunkards and hooligans have bothered doing anything, if they had have been able to walk from the ground without such a presence haunting their footsteps? They probably might have done something, they are idiots, but it's hard not to think it would have been less controversial than what eventually occurred.

The police these days are all about visibility and power as a deterrent, but when someone is unbelievably angry and possibly fueled by copious amounts of alcohol, is it any surprise that such a presence rubs people up the wrong way?

Just verbalizing a wonderance...

 

A minority of boneheads were up for it, can't blame the Old Bill at all for dispersing them.
I've been to hundreds of games, home and away and always manage, somehow, to distant myself from any troublemakers. You might be unlucky to get attacked by opposition boneheads every now and then but our lot yesterday went looking for it.

 

Totally agree with you Gandalf, how ridiculous is the noon kick off, I know pubs in Sunderland that were open at 7 yesterday morning, and everyone is on the piss on a sunday lunchtime anyway, then they wonder why theres trouble, the police have a lot to learn and as I've said before on here, they are responsible for a lot ( not all ) of the problems.
If that had been a normal Saturday afternoon kick off there would have been a lot less trouble in my opinion.
As for the bloke punching the horse, well you can't allow for that mentality, he should be locked up for his own safety.

 

The bloke punching the horse could well become a You Tube sensation...for all the wrong reasons.
I consider both Tyne & Wear derbies nasty fixtures. There's always too much riding on it (possibly because they are normally the two biggest games of the season for both clubs...maybe if we were both winning trophies this 'passion' would be diluted a wee bit?) Or maybe both sets of fans simply detest each other?

Regarding the consumption of alcohol yesterday, I don't know if that was a contributing factor. I think the trouble was more result-related than booze-related and I know plenty of Newcastle fans who don't need a few pints to get going.

 

Yeah, very difficult not to put it passed boneheads. I was just verbalizing a thought because there was to me so much excessive police presence before and after the game that I wondered how much it might contribute to violence itself.

I agree, but we'll never get to find out whether that's a better idea after today, they'll probably make us play at 9am with tanks outside in future!

Theoretically, if you make the game later, leave the pubs open for longer, then the consumption of alcohol isn't compressed into a narrow period and I think the repercussions would be more desirable. Obviously that will give people more time to drink, but it's the length of time and the fact lunch is an important break that might be worth considering. I mean, half-starved pissheads aren't going to be rational are they?

All we can do is hypothesize. Maybe certain sections of our support don't deserve the chance to earn some trust back with the authorities after today.

 

Gandalf, you've got to have a police presence there otherwise mayhem rules. Looking at the videos from outside of the ground yesterday, it was our fans who squard up to the coppers. It was fans who could have made their way home without throwing bottles and god knows what else. And judging by how close they were to the ground, I'd imagine most of those fans had been inside St James watching the game (probably on Level 7 where many of the boneheads are).

 

Travelled into town yesterday on a bus full of youngsters who talked about nothing but the pubs they were going to go to and the amount of booze they were going to drink, not one mention of football.

 

Questions need to be asked and answered about the amount of flares being taken into grounds now. There could be some serious trouble with them if they're going to become common place.