Just seen this report on the BBC website and I'm afraid, words totally fail me. http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/28918021
Whenever I read about North African football there always seems to be trouble with Algeria, they always kick off when they play Egypt, perhaps it's just coincidental that every time they crop up the news is negative.
I see they've closed football down in Algeria. This really is a terrible story. I actually experienced something very similar when I was in India in 2012. I was out there watching test cricket in 2012 and we had won the test match in Kolkata early on day 5. A local derby between Kingfisher East Bengal and Mohan Bagan was taking place later that day. So myself and a few members of the 'barmy army' thought we'd go and watch the game for something to do. The stadium was a building site, had no floodlights and the seats were concrete steps. Still, it was a 100,000 capacity stadium and there were easily 80,000 people watching the game. The game kicked off late due to crowd trouble and the match was a bit of a farce really. The ref had obviously been paid off by the home side. After sending a Mohan Bagan (away side) player off a full riot broke out. Stones and rocks were thrown onto the pitch by the away fans, one of which ended up hitting their own player and knocking him out. Luckily he was ok, but obviously the player from Algeria wasn't so lucky. The riot spilt out into the streets and I got out of there as soon as humanly possible. The point is that, footballers, no matter where they play over the world, should be confident that they can work in a safe environment. It's totally unacceptable that they don't have those guarantees.
Riots must be terrifying situations especially in a city you don't know, I've seen mass disorder and big street fights but nothing involving hundreds of people throwing rocks. In fairness in regards to hooliganism the Police in this country are absolutely superb, I don't know why other countries are so poor at dealing at with it, FIFA really need to start issuing bans.
Resources and mentality are the obvious answers I guess. The riot was pretty scary to be fair. Once things kicked off the police lathicharged the crowds with a vengeance. We're talking serious beatings. Match was abandoned. Luckily, I was wearing my England cricket shirt so was taken for a neutral and managed to avoid a lot of the problems. There were people with planks of wood with nails in them. I know we have some punch ups at games. A good mate of mine got hit with a brick at an Ipswich games a few years back. It's just that it tends to be more isolated incidents that full on disorder.
Disorganisation and corruption is a massive part of that too. Take places like Russia, Poland and the Balkan states you'd expect them to be more organised then a lot of other places, yet from what I've seen they are atrocious. The banning orders have helped nearly 3,000 or so fans banned that probably covers a lot of the worse of the worst, you might get 25 blokes meeting up for a punch up somewhere and the odd derby day flare up but that's it. A lot of the mass disorder was caused by a hardcore group of 100 or so hooligans, the rest of the people involved tended to get carried away in the moment.
