A night of football has descended into a glorious farce of flying chairs, tear gas, and gendarmes fleeing like startled pigeons in a Parisian square. Dozens injured. Another European city set ablaze. And somewhere in a Whitehall bunker, a Home Office spinner is polishing a graph titled ‘See? We’re Not the Worst.’
The Champions League final, that great cathedral of continental competition, has once again revealed its crypt of chaos. French police, armed with the latest in riot suppression technology and a national reputation for non-nonsense crowd control, were reduced to a shambolic retreat as rival ultras turned the Stade de France into a battlefield of misplaced machismo. It was a scene so unedifying, so utterly Gallic in its theatrical collapse, that one half-expected a mime artist to wander through the tear gas, waving a white flag made of baguette.
Dozens injured, we are told. Which in football riot terms means: a few lads with spectacular black eyes who will later claim they ‘took one for the terrace’, a scattering of bewildered locals caught in the crossfire, and an indeterminate number of police officers with frayed nerves and a new-found respect for the British bobby’s ability to out-laugh a drunken Scouser. The French have always looked down their noses at our matchday safety record, a record built not on heavy-handed policing but on a long-standing tradition of rhythmic disappointment and cultural self-flagellation. We don’t riot, we queue. And we moan. And we write strongly worded letters to the match commander about the price of pies.
But this, this is a vindication. A glorious, tear-gassed, rolling-news-of-chaos vindication. For years we have endured the smug smiles of continental security experts, their PowerPoint presentations on ‘European Best Practice’ while our own constabularies were derided as tea-drinking dilettantes. Yet who is injured now? Who is overwhelmed? Not the British bobby, who has perfected the art of the ‘stop and search’ with a smile and a polite inquiry about your day. Not the British steward, who can de-escalate a potential flashpoint by appealing to a fan’s sense of queue order. No, it is the French, with their CRS riot squads and their water cannons and their… what’s the word for it… panache in the face of failure.
Let us be clear: the violence is deplorable. Absolutely. No one should be hurt for the sake of a game. But if we are to have violence, let us at least have the satisfaction of pointing across the Channel and saying, ‘We told you so.’ And so I do. I told you so. I told you that investing in railway sponsorship and banning ambulance-chasing lawyers would not stop a bloke with a flare and a grudge. I told you that the key to crowd safety is not more baton rounds but a national willingness to accept that football is, at its core, a conduit for class warfare and tribal identity. And I told you that the French would eventually run headlong into a wall of their own bureaucratic arrogance.
Now, as the gendarmes count their casualties and the French interior minister scrambles for a scapegoat, Britain stands tall. Not with a saviour’s pride, but with the sneer of a man who has watched the neighbours’ BBQ go up in flames while his own plate of bangers remains perfectly cooked. We are not safe because we are smarter. We are safe because we have had more practice. We have had Hillsborough, and Heysel, and the Bradford fire. We have learned through tragedy. The French have learned through theory. And theories, as any football fan knows, are what you produce when you’ve just been knocked out on penalties.
So raise a glass of warm lager to our continental cousins. They may have better wine, better cheese, and better railways. But when it comes to not letting football matches descend into a medieval siege, we have them beat. And if that means I am a patriotic pugilist of pub logic, then so be it. France, you had one job. And you set your own stadium on fire.
