From the Archive: The government tries to tackle the hooligans, but attacks all of us instead
Everything has been a bit up in the air this week, but here's last night's post for paying subscribers on the government's reaction to growing hooliganism in the 1980s.
It is a fundamental truth of any look at the history of football hooliganism in the UK that crowd disorder has been a part – whether small or large – of the culture of the game for almost as long as crowds have gathered to watch matches. There are recorded instances of trouble at matches going all the way back to the 1880s, and to this day there remains a chance, at any match, that any spectator could be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
For those of us who have attended matches for many years, this is largely considered a small and manageable risk, but those who view the game from the outside have developed a somewhat different position on it all and, in the summer of 1985, those people were queuing up to tell the rest of us exactly what they thought.
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