MANLY United. - by thefonz
nickie on 28/5/2008 at 16:54
Don't get me wrong SD - I'd take Gerrard any day over Terry but he's no angel and I have seen him do the 'red card' bit to a ref and there's a great youtube of him pushing Avram Grant over. :laff:
And the EU do dumb things every day so don't see why they wouldn't do this. I'd prefer to see more British players in the top teams but if they're not good enough then it isn't surprising there are so many foreign players. It won't change whilst the Premiership is about money and not a lot else. And I ain't cynical at all. :)
SD on 28/5/2008 at 17:06
It's UEFA/FIFA's latest reaction to English domination of Europe. Last time English clubs were winning everything, they fashioned an excuse to ban English teams from European competition for almost a decade. They won't get away with that a second time, not least because English fans are among the best behaved on the continent nowadays, so they're trying something marginally more subtle.
nickie on 28/5/2008 at 17:18
And I'm not going to disagree with anything you've just said. It's just fine and dandy for British fans to be stabbed, beaten up, pissed on (oops sorry that was Rugby but couldn't be Rugby because they're all so well behaved!), but hey, let's just ban the British.
Anyone going to watch Euro 2008?
D'Arcy on 28/5/2008 at 17:43
Quote Posted by SD
It's UEFA/FIFA's latest reaction to English domination of Europe. Last time English clubs were winning everything, they fashioned an excuse to ban English teams from European competition for almost a decade.
Yeah, great 'excuse'... It's actually mildly amusing to see how you so quickly get outraged and classify someone as a twat for abusing american tourists whilst drunk, yet are so keen to easily dismiss hordes of drunkards who murder 39 people, blaming it on the police, organisation, etc :rolleyes:
I wonder why UEFA has it in for English teams. I guess that English teams are probably the only ones who have an excess of foreigners in their squads. Strangely, UEFA never seem to be too worried when Italian teams dominate Europe.
P.S.- And English teams were banned for five years (Liverpool got an extra year), so that is hardly 'almost a decade'.
SD on 28/5/2008 at 18:37
FYI, 39 people weren't "murdered", by drunkards or otherwise - and, yes, I would argue that the majority of blame rests with UEFA, who were forewarned that holding the match in a decaying edifice was asking for trouble, and the Belgian police, whose idea of crowd control was a thin line of chickenwire.
Certainly it's clear to me that the English fans should have shouldered no more of the blame than the Italians did, and yet the Italian fans got away without sanction, to maim another day.
The (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heysel_Stadium_Disaster) Wikipedia article is surprisingly good, especially with regard to the background to the disaster. I suggest you read it.
nickie on 28/5/2008 at 18:41
There's a lot to what you say D'Arcy but I don't believe these things happen in isolation. For example, if you read (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heysel_Stadium_disaster) this entry you'll see that the year before, Liverpool fans were 'attacked, stabbed, and slashed' by Roma fans and that it appeared to be premeditated. It doesn't, however, mention what, if any, punishment was meted out to them and I haven't tried to research it. The grievance here will be carried forward regardless.
In another thread I asked what it was that make people so gleeful when a particular opposing team is defeated. I don't understand it myself but I learned elsewhere it's mostly down to history. A passionate football supporter never forgets any wrong or ignominious defeat. So it doesn't seem to matter whether it was 2 years ago or twenty years ago, that supporter will never forget and it tends to live on in the psyche.
But whatever Liverpool's part in that, why ban other English clubs as well. A blanket punishment which served only to cause resentment.
I see SD cited the same article!!
And I don't give an eff what anyone says, Beckham just produced the cross, as usual, that scored a goal in the England/USA friendly. Whatever age, absolute quality.
So, after some discussion on great footballers who didn't need to cheat, new question. Greatest footballing hero. For me (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Cruijff) Johan Cruyff.
D'Arcy on 28/5/2008 at 20:48
You see, that kind of argumentation, about the 'background' to the incident, really doesn't do it for me somehow. Because it's almost as if someone's saying that what happened was, somehow, justified. The fact that went down in history was that 39 fans died as a direct consequence of the actions from drunken Liverpool fans. You can argue that there were failures in the organisation, that the authorities were careless - that might be true, but those were the standards back then (which, unfortunately, was proven once more four years later at Hillsborough) and the fact is that until then no tragedy such as that one had occurred.
UEFA didn't decide to punish the English clubs based upon the Heysel accident alone. Hooliganism was at a peak during the early eighties, and there had been several previous incidents, not all of them involving English fans, it's true, just as the reports of what happened in Rome show, but many of the incidents did involve them. I was only twelve when the Heysel accident happened, but both in that very same season, and in the season before Benfica played against Liverpool, and the Liverpool fans already had an aura of violence surrounding them, so much that my mom didn't want to let me go watch the game. How fair was that reputation, I can't tell. But that was how they were seen over here, so they must have done something to earn it.
I watched the final live on TV back then, and the images of the italian fans being crushed stayed forever in my mind. Even though I was only twelve, I already had a deep admiration for English teams, firstly because of Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest (which was the very first English team I've heard of), and also because I loved to see Everton in that year of 1985 winning the Cup Winners' Cup against Rapid Vienna, so I was actually sad when they were banned.
As for footballing hero, well, to me there's always Eusébio, of course. But I've never watched him play, so I'll have to say that the best player I've ever seen playing was Maradona. I just won't call him a 'hero', because I didn't really like him that much. But I have to admit that he was the best.
nickie on 29/5/2008 at 18:49
Not justification, never that - attempt to understand maybe why people sometimes behave the way they do. It baffles me that's for sure. And Hillsborough, which I generally pass once a day - would that be called natural justice I wonder - 96 Liverpool fans dead? Perhaps not, more than twice as many. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_hooliganism) This (which is a reasonably comprehensive history of football violence by country) I found quite fascinating. First instances of football hooliganism in 1314 when
Quote:
Edward II banned football (which then was a violent free-for-all involving rival villages fly-hacking a pig's bladder across the local heath) because he believed the disorder surrounding matches might lead to social unrest or even treason.
I find that rather reassuring.
And Maradona, I'm afraid, doesn't count, brilliant though he was - 'didn't need to cheat' were the operative words. :)
SD on 30/5/2008 at 12:07
Quote Posted by D'Arcy
You see, that kind of argumentation, about the 'background' to the incident, really doesn't do it for me somehow. Because it's almost as if someone's saying that what happened was, somehow,
justified. The fact that went down in history was that 39 fans died as a direct consequence of the actions from drunken Liverpool fans.
It's not about justification D'Arcy, just an attempt to understand that things aren't black-and-white. These events did not take place in a vacuum.
Liverpool fans had suffered greatly at the hands of Roma fans in 1984. Many English fans were stabbed by Italians. People were attacked en masse. Even to this day, Italian fans are known for riding around on Vespas armed with Stanley knives (just ask the United fans who have been to Rome in the past few seasons).
When Liverpool again drew Italian opposition in 1985, there was immediate concern. UEFA's choice of venue, the crumbling Heysel Stadium, compounded matters.
When Juventus fans started hurling bits of the stadium at Liverpool fans, things escalated pretty quickly. The straw that broke the camel's back was a young lad being set upon by Juventus fans near the chicken wire barricade (Roma fans had slashed a kid the previous year).
So Liverpool fans broke over the fencing and charged at the opposition. Not a commendable thing to do, but in the face of such provocation, surely understandable. In the crush of retreating Juventus fans, 39 people died.
Is that murder? I don't see it myself. What I see is a horrendous and catastrophic failure of the authorities to control a potentially incendiary situation that resulted in people dying.
Quote Posted by D'Arcy
UEFA didn't decide to punish the English clubs based upon the Heysel accident alone. Hooliganism was at a peak during the early eighties, and there had been several previous incidents, not all of them involving English fans, it's true, just as the reports of what happened in Rome show, but many of the incidents did involve them. I was only twelve when the Heysel accident happened, but both in that very same season, and in the season before Benfica played against Liverpool, and the Liverpool fans already had an aura of violence surrounding them, so much that my mom didn't want to let me go watch the game. How fair was that reputation, I can't tell. But that was how they were seen over here, so they must have done
something to earn it.
The irony of that is that Liverpool were unusual in never really having much of a hooligan element. Of course, there were problems with English fans in general, but they were no worse than the Italians or Dutch. You just need to look at recent events involving Italian fans to see that they're still pretty much where they were in the 80s. The English fans are much better behaved these days.
D'Arcy on 30/5/2008 at 15:15
I understand that things aren't black and white, SD. Normally a tragedy such as that one is the result of the accumulation of a series of actions and mistakes. Had the organisation been better, and perhaps the opposing fans would have been too far apart for a confrontation to exist. Had an effective barrier been put in place separating the fans, which wouldn't collapse, and perhaps the Liverpool fans' charge would have no disastrous effects. Or, even with the bad organisation and the chicken wire in place, had the Liverpool fans not charged the opposing fans and no one would have died.
But what I mostly object to is when you refer to this tragedy as some sort of trick, or deliberate strategy by UEFA with the sole intention of attacking English clubs. UEFA isn't exactly a model of virtues, but there's still a big distance between that and deliberately putting lives at stake as a means to an obscure end.
As for the violence aura I referred to, I think that it was mostly attached to English football fans in general, and not specifically to the Liverpool ones. I agree that English fans are generally better behaved these days, although they still tend to cause problems when they gather abroad in big numbers and alcohol is involved.
