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Kevin Mousley presents his view of Tuesday evening's events.....

My frantic monitoring of West Ham’s attempts to sign strikers for the coming season has been rudely interrupted by an outburst of media outrage. Apparently there was a bit of a ruck outside Upton Park on Tuesday night.

Now I believe in all but a handful of situations violence is distasteful, unnecessary and counter productive but rather than believing I was witnessing civilisation as we know it collapsing before our very eyes, I greeted the pitch invasions as they happened with nothing more than a weary sigh.

Predictably planet football went into an overdrive of simplistic moralising.

Let’s look at the facts. A bunch of numbskulls, no doubt raised on the fantasies of their equally dumb dads, with their fake or wildly embellished memories of punch-ups a plenty against rival ‘firms’ in the 70’s and 80’s, were gifted an opportunity to live out their malevolent dreams by the Carling Cup draw.

What happened; well one caller to 5 Lives’ phone in on the affair- he was called Ahmed so I assumed he was no mutton head boot boy - said it was the best atmosphere at Upton Park for years. He said his 17 year old daughter had been exhilarated by the experience of being inside a passion doused Upton Park and coming away with a win.

Granted no one in their right mind wants to go to football with a roulette chance that you’ll get your head caved in. As I read it no ‘innocent bystander’ did. There was a stabbing, which is poor but I have no idea how this came about and judging by the reports I have read, nor has anyone else.

Inside the ground there was a lot of name calling and pelting between two small sections of the crowd and then there was the ludicrous sight of dick heads prancing around the pitch, belly akimbo, like Stavros Flatley while loitering around the edges were some malnourished looking berks, fist waving, blood pumping like a group of extras from the 70’s horror flick the Wicker Man (check it out).

Some twit I know had been on his Facebook site looking forward to meeting up with ‘the Millwall’. The net and the grapevines were awash with such sad playground nonsense. So, it was not a surprise and the clubs were expecting trouble, consequently, I read today, police presence was tripled.

Actually if a couple of hundred members of so called ‘firms’ are determined to have a battle in a warren of terraced streets then the entire establishment of the Met wouldn’t have stopped them.

For all the dramatic photos in the papers and video clips there were 13 arrests. Most of the pitch invaders were so dim it slipped their minds that their mugs will be so easily identifiable there will mostly likely never experience the inside of the ground again. The cops have so much footage of people who were fighting outside the ground there should be plenty of evidence to lift them and bring them to court.

Even so, apparently our World Cup bid may be on the rocks, never mind that in Italy they have been killing themselves on the terraces and that we have a better record on public order at football matches than almost anywhere else in the world. If anything has bollixed our chances of hosting the big one, it is the media’s over reaction which led the Times of India, among other foreign press, to talk about the ‘Horrific Violence’ surrounding the game. Now, sure, it was not pretty but horrific?

And then there is Harry; good ol Harry the master of the under statement; “if they ever meet in the league then the game should be played behind closed doors because the human cost of these kind of disturbances is just too high to bear any longer."

So, what is he going to call for next? That every town and city centre be closed and booze banned because of the violence, vomit and arrests every weekend. That cutlers be banned and we eat with our fingers because of the truly horrific consequences of their wares being used to slaughter young people on the streets of London and elsewhere, that we abandon our cars and take to a horse and carriage to stop 2500 people being killed on our roads each and every year or than we ban relations between men and women because of the violent passion that they sometimes provoke.

Even the normally excellent and tempered Martin Samuel declared it was West Ham’s fault and regretted taking his kids. He let slip that he’d told them it was time to experience ‘a proper football match’. Now I am not aware that West Ham v Millwall clashes in the past have been noted for the quality of their football; so what did he mean?

Well I am assuming passion. Trouble with passion is that it ain’t easy to control that’s why we call it passion. Occasionally it spills over.

Oh yeah then there was Henry Winter in the Telegraph .. oh don’t let’s go there…

In recent years West Ham, in common with all the other football clubs, have spent millions to design hooliganism out of our stadia; priced the tickets to ensure a certain clientele and put in seating and cameras so miscreants so minded to violence can be identified and expelled.

The events of Tuesday night were, if not a one off, close to it. All the evidence suggests that these violet outbursts are sporadic, pathetic hurrahs of rage expressed by a diminishing group of yahoos whose day is long gone because the opportunity for casual football related violence – bar the vagaries of a fixture computer – simply does not exist these days.

Now can we get back to where our next striker is coming from?


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