As Bad as Things Got: Millwall, 13th March 1985

When Millwall travelled to Kenilworth Road for an FA Cup quarter-final in 1985, the result was a new low for a club whose reputation was already in the gutter.

The passing of three and a half decades has left the past looking very much like a foreign country. They do things differently, there. Everybody now knows just how bad football’s crises of the 1980s were, and where they ended up. It was a slow build-up from the late 1960s on, really, and as crowds continued to fall from their post-war high, the hooligans stood out more and more. They had not walked away from the game. If anything, they made up a bigger and bigger proportion of everybody who was left.

And when the amount of disorder at matches started to really accelerate from the middle of the 1970s on, nobody really knew what to do about it. Every incident would result in the same indignant spluttering from the game’s governing bodies and government ministers. Politicians and columnists who yearned for simplistic and sharp punishment were easy to find and happy to mug in front of the cameras for money, attention, or both.