Heavy handed policing can crop up at all levels, as Jonny Chapman reports
As an away fan at the Emley v Boston Utd FA Trophy tie in January I was as bemused as the rest of our support to hear a Tannoy message asking us to stop using bad language as “it is giving your club a bad name”. I hasten to add that there was nothing racist or intimidatory about the songs. Most clubs must have a comparably “bad name” since the refrain to ‘Can you hear the Emley sing?” is not the most original chant ever.
Paul Meacock outlines two incidents which tarred the image of a team and their supporters
I’m sitting in the corner of The Loft, early in the second half of a match that QPR are losing 1-0 at home to Portsmouth when I notice a commotion beginning at the opposite end of the ground. A couple of dozen Portsmouth fans are clambering up the walls of the away end and trying to get into the adjacent Ellerslie Road stand, mainly populated by parents with children. It takes them about ten minutes to scale the walls, after which they set about anyone in a QPR shirt.
Adam Brown describes how the policing of Manchester United fans' visit to Porto descended into chaos
“I’m fucking sick of this. Everywhere we go we’re treated like shit.” I was inclined to agree with the bloke holding his head as another wave of batons came down on Manchester United fans entering Estádio Das Antas. To return home to tales of a fan with 17 stitches in his head, another laid up with baton wounds and another with three metal pellets still lodged in his body wasn’t exactly the celebration we had hoped for in reaching the semi-finals of the Champions League.
Hooliganism is getting out of control in Holland. Marcelle Van Hoof describes the latest incident that resulted in a supporter's death
On Sunday morning March 23rd around 50 Ajax fans met and fought with 200 of their Feyenoord counterparts in a field near a busy main road. In the fight which lasted only five minutes one Ajax supporter, Carlo Picornie, was so badly hit on the head with steel and wooden bars that he died.
Jimmy Nicholl has returned to Raith Rovers, but has he done the right thing? Gary Oliver thinks not
Unless a Sunday scandal sheet catches Alan Sugar and Terry Venables sharing illicit candlelit dinners, 1997 will witness no more unlikely reunion than that of Raith Rovers and Jimmy Nicholl. For Raith’s supporters there is relief that hostilities between the club and its most successful manager have finally ceased. But Nicholl returning alongside manager Iain Munro, as Messiah without portfolio, is a bizarre twist which raises more questions than it answers.