Football hooliganism is a scrappy, random affair

By WENDELL STEAVENSON

s English and Tunisian fans stepped up from the metro into the wide, sunlit boulevard outside Marseilles' Velodrome Stadium last Monday, bits of mayhem were already under way. The Old Port area of the city showed the scars of rioting from the night before: cafes with smashed windows, crushed beer cans, boarded-up shops. In front of the stadium tens of thousands of fans milled about, some waving the red cross of St. George on a white background, others the red and white star and crescent of Tunisia.

A crowd of ticketless England fans lounged against a fence, bottles of lager in hand. "You can get tickets for the Tunisia end, no problem," said one, "but I'm not going in there. We're going to go down the beach to watch--they've got screens set up there." They held their ground as a dozen supporters, identified as English by their bare chests and Umbro shorts, rushed across the road lobbing beer cans ahead of them. "Hey--we're English!" the group shouted at them, but to no avail. Several hundred people, dislodged and apprehensive, ran past with body-slamming momentum.

The disorder was unpredictable and unfocused. Packs of running thugs threw things, but not at anyone in particular. A group of Tunisians lit red flares and chucked them--ineffectively--against the bright blue sky. An England fan, young, drunk and skinny, was beaten by police with truncheons. Most stood, craning to see the action. A phalanx of riot police nearby did the same. One Englishman, shirtless and decorated with patriotic tattoos, raged at the troublemakers. "They don't love football," he fumed. "I love football."

Inside the stadium all was peaceful celebration. Apart from a wide strip of red at one end, Tunisians cropped up only intermittently among a sea of Saxons. Inevitably, the hated French ticketing policy designed to segregate fans had broken down. It was ironic that it didn't seem to be needed in the first place: fighting broke out not in the stands but on the beach in front of the screens. When England's Alan Shearer scored in the first half, someone threw a bottle and someone else threw another. Then seats were ripped up. Nothing draws a crowd quite like a riot. Hundreds of onlookers stood in semicircles around scrapping fans and then surged away as the trouble moved in their direction.

After the game was over, authorities in the Old Port closed every bar and lined La Canebiere, the main drag, with riot police. A crowd of several thousand North African youths--noticeably few Tunisian colors among them--milled along the tense streets. When asked what they were waiting for, they replied, "English hooligans--we want to show them that the city does not belong to them." The English kept their distance, and those who emerged from the Metro were quickly escorted back down by waiting police.

Whose fault was all this? The violence in Marseilles was amorphous, random and scrappy. Much was said and written about the "lawless minority," but it's hard to imagine just how tiny that minority can be. Sometimes it is as small as four or five. Pockets of trouble within huge, milling, running, swirling crowds make policing imprecise and difficult. The line between taunt and attack, singing and shoving, boisterousness and brawling is easily crossed. After it's all over, the arrests have been made, wounds stitched up and windows replaced, there's still no answer to the question of why. Except that it was; and it will be again.