Do we really fear fans, flares and football?

Victoria Police fear a “Fagin” problem”. It was a delicious opening. With the world celebrating “Back to the Future Day” The Herald Sun decided to take us back all the way to Charles Dickens and 19th century London.

But even the great novelist who invented such characters as Scrooge, Miss Havisham and Mr. Gradgrind, would surely have refrained from telling such a story. Details are sketchy at best and it all seems a little far-fetched. Unscrupulous “predatory” adults (18-40) are spreading poison and putting flares into the hands of kids and then slipping back into the faceless mass, rotten teeth showing as they laugh their way back to the gin palaces and backstreet brawls.

There is a nod to the more recent eighties, however, as these characters are supposedly inspired by the heyday of English soccer hooliganism.

This is a bit strange too. Is there anyone anywhere really inspired by English fans of three decades ago? If they are then the vast majority of them would be going to football games in peace, paying reasonable amounts of money to get in and then going home.

Most of the hooliganism that there actually was consisted of running and shouting. If there is any inspiration then perhaps it partly comes from the media-made myths of the time. Something to think about.

And the only flares seen in English football stadiums in the eighties came right at the end of the decade after the ‘second summer of love’ when loved-up, greasy-haired teenagers started to wear jeans that had wider bottoms than Mark Viduka.

It is all a little strange to me. Not being Australian and not living in Australia, such reports are simply amusing, like watching one of those Taiwanese animated videos that give a take on world events. It’s like ‘let’s see what these crazy guys are saying now’. But if you live there and have to suffer this kind of nonsense on a regular and real level then it must become depressing.

From the outside looking in, it seems something of a battle to be a football fan in Australia. It doesn’t happen elsewhere, at least not in my experience. I haven’t seen this kind of reporting anywhere in Asia, where I have lived for almost two decades. In the United States, plenty dismiss or don’t care about football but I haven’t seen such beat-ups. It is the twin assault from both press and police that marks Australia out.

In England, things are pretty calm these days. There are complaints from away fans at draconian policing at games seen as ‘high-risk’ and this has become more of an issue of late but is still not the norm. At least, journalists don’t then stick the boot in any more. If anything, football is so dominant in the UK media these days that it is becoming tiresome.

In most of Asia, watching football is largely a police, security and stress free-experience. You often get a high security presence at Chinese stadiums, partly due to a regime that is wary of large gatherings (in Australia, it is the politicians who seem to be the vicious ones) and there can be plenty of police in Indonesia where there sometimes is violence – real violence of a sort that makes concerns about overhead clapping seem even sillier.

I am not pretending to understand what it is like to be a football fan in an environment that can sometimes seem hostile. I have no idea as I only caught a glimpse.

I remember in Sydney, going out to the pub to watch the game (none of the hotels I stayed in showed Asian Cup games as the channel showing them was new and most did not have it – the one negative from the tournament) and people moaning that football was on television. You can get a quick grumble anywhere but this was real complaining from people who did not just not like football but seemed to like not liking football.

They almost seemed to take it personally. It was a new thing for me and while there are no solutions, there is sympathy.

John Duerden has lived in Asia since the last century, at various times calling India, Malaysia and South Korea home. He is the Asian football correspondent for The Guardian, BBC Radio 5, ESPN, World Soccer and Associated Press and various other media.