From the Archive: Marseille 2016 - how to make sense of this chaos?

Another two-parter from Euro 2016 for paying subscribers, this time on the trouble in Marseille.

There were tears in France, today. At one end of the country, Dimitri Payet wept as he left the pitch at the Stade de France, substituted after scoring the host nation’s winning goal against Romania with a shot of such perfect power and trajectory that it may well end up in The Louvre. At the other end of the country, though, the tears flowed from the eyes of both the innocent and the guilty, the result of gas fired by police as supporters of England, Russia, others, and the police fought pitched battles in the bars, streets and alleyways of the beautiful city of Marseille.

It started before a ball was even kicked, for Christ’s sake, and, before I go any further, I should point out that the specifics of who did, shouted, sang or said what to whom is an absolute, complete irrelevance in this case. If the first point that you take from this is the origins of a perceived slight, you’re backing the wrong horse. You’re on the wrong side of the argument. Grown men should be able to go to football matches and drink alcohol without this being the dismal result, and to suggest otherwise insults the overwhelming majority of us who go our entire lives without ever throwing a plastic chair at a riot policeman.