AT LAST, a football hooligan has been sent to jail, convicted of hurling rocks into the rival stands at a recent derby match in Nicosia.
Accepting a plea for mitigation that the hooligan was the sole breadwinner for his wife and three children, the judge commuted his initial three-month sentence into an imaginative weekend jail sentence, lasting for 25 weeks. The 33-year-old taxi driver, who had pleaded guilty to the offence, will now be able to work from Monday to Friday, before checking in to jail on Friday night to spend the weekend in prison. He has also been banned from attending all sporting events for two and a half years in a sentence that rams home the seriousness of the offence without pushing a whole family over the brink.
Such severity is long overdue, and the judge is to be congratulated for it. For too long, hooligans have been allowed to get away with violent behaviour that would land them in jail were it committed in any place other than a football stadium. More often than not, they have not even been arrested, or if they have, they have been slapped on the wrist with a fine or a suspended sentence.
Arrests are now thankfully on the increase, with police increasingly resorting to video surveillance to identify the culprits. A string of jail sentences would be the next step, underlining that the authorities are serious in their aim of eradicating the plague of hooliganism from sport in Cyprus.
Indeed, many hooligans passing through the courts are ordinary men, with stable jobs and families, transformed on match day into violent thugs by the tribalism of the stands. Tough jail sentences might make them think twice.
But sentencing is only one strand of the equation, albeit a very important one. Clubs themselves must take up the challenge, making it clear there is no place for violent behaviour in their fan base. Too often when violence erupts (which is almost every weekend), chairmen blame the ref, the rival fans or the police. They must learn to condemn their own, with measures taken to exclude known troublemakers from the stands.
This week’s trial also highlighted another major problem. The hooligan sentenced on Wednesday had been drunk when he committed his offences, his lawyer pointing out that supporters of all hues often congregated at club bars, drinking heavily on match days, already drunk by the time they got on coaches that took them to the game.
Club facilities should be banned from selling alcohol ahead of games, and stewards should be made to refuse entry to any supporter who showed up drunk. Alcohol was a major contributor to the dark days of English hooliganism; it is clearly a problem in Cyprus too, its control a key element in eradicating hooliganism from the stands.
