Hooliganism: the ugly rush

WE WERE warned to stay back and hide the colours of our scarves and T-shirts. Having barbwire between myself and the police is not a first for me; I was involved in various demonstrations during my teenage years and am accustomed to large crowds of screaming, raving heads.
However, standing outside a football stadium with a group of aggravated fans pleading with policemen to let us through was unknown territory. We weren’t trying to cause trouble (at least I wasn’t), but the message was that if you don’t want to get your head smashed in, you should either “zip up and hide your colours or wait until the opposing team leaves.”
Football has always caused a stir in social properness since the English came up with hooliganism in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although the English Disease can apparently be traced back to the Middle Ages, when Edward II banned football because he believed the disorder surrounding matches might lead to social unrest or even treason, it has somehow seeped into international social groups causing so much trouble. ‘Social unrest’ doesn’t even come close to describing it.
If you happen to have witnessed an act of hooliganism, you’ll perhaps portray it as the closest you’ll ever come to war. “Those were my exact feelings when I was 15 and I found myself caught up in the middle of a heated argument that quickly turned into a fist-fight and eventually a riot,” explains football fan Panayiotis Andreou, 27.
He admits that it was an adrenaline-rush experience he felt the need to participate in. “When you’re at such a young age, when rebelling is in your blood, you don’t run. You stay and fight!”  
Even before entering the stadium, the vibes are strong enough to make your stomach flutter with excitement for no apparent reason. It’s almost as if you know something could happen at any moment and unconsciously you’re preparing to run for your life, join in or take a spot where observation is boundless.
“I remember the first time I saw a fight break out in front of me. I froze and felt completely useless for not being able to stop it,” recalls Theodosia Larini, a 28-year-old lawyer. Indeed, it can be difficult and traumatising for a woman or a child when fans clash, however, everywhere you look, there are kids holding onto their father or mother’s hand, decked in the favourite team’s colours while groups of girls keep moving in, sometimes chanting or talking on their mobile phones, looking as though they don’t have a care in the world.
Gone are the days when football grounds were viewed as a female-free zone; today, the scene is open to all ages, races and sexes. Elena, 17, says: “I am a big fan of the sport anyway but I also regularly attend games because it’s always a fun environment. We meet up with friends and love the excitement and roughness of it.”   
In the prime of hooliganism in Cyprus, one incident that remains in mind is the image of a middle-aged man being beaten to near death by a group of youngsters.
His seven-year-old son witnessed the episode and once the angry mob was pulled away, the boy stood over his father’s still body, pulling his hair and trying to lift him.
As a 28-year-old married woman who occasionally feels the need to let loose and take in some excitement, there are very few places to do so in a small and prejudiced society like Cyprus. Imagine what it’s like for a hot-blooded teenager or socially pressured 35-year-old! Patrick Murphy, CRSS of the University of Lancaster once wrote: “While it will probably give the administrators of Cypriot football little comfort, it may be that the sport is acting as a kind of safety valve for aggressive male adolescent energies.
“If these are chocked-off in the football context, they may be displaced and surface in other, perhaps equally if not more threatening social contexts.”
Despite a get-tough-on-hooligans law being passed almost two years ago, football-related violence hasn’t died down. While government and police are scratching their heads as to how incidents keep occurring, basic statements we were given by hardcore fans, which were almost impossible to find let alone talk, give a good indication.
One 25-year-old said: “We hate each other – even if it is for just 90 minutes.”
Another, in his early 30s said: “We don’t feel it’s a game. It’s war. And it’s one that has been going on forever. Opposing teams like APOEL and Omonoia or AEL and Apollon will never like each other and there’s nothing anyone can do.”
While it was almost impossible to contact fans from any first division teams, one has to simply search the internet to see just how serious football fans can be. One video found on YouTube was titled: ‘Hardcore hooligans, stand your ground and fight’.
In the UK, more than 2,500 English football fans were banned from going to Euro 2004. This was based on a policy founded on the notion that hooliganism is the preserve of a small minority of trouble-makers.
Target this marginal faction, so the official argument goes, and you will eliminate the problem. However, psychologists who specialise in crowd behaviour and who have made a special study of football fans’ behaviour, have arrived at almost diametrically opposite conclusions. They believe that many caught up in riots have no previous history of violence and instead are galvanised into actions by a sense of solidarity which emerges suddenly and powerfully, as a direct result of the way the authorities confront crowds.
Dr Clifford Stott, a psychologist at the University of Liverpool began to formulate his ideas after his study of the London poll tax riots in 1990, where it became clear that violence from a group of people who usually had not met much, or even at all before, emerges from the rapid but powerful development of a shared group identity.
This identity, he believes, is based on a strong sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’ which is often spurred on by certain police control techniques. Add to that the strong history that exists between Cypriot teams, the politics and the ‘small society’ factor and you have a recipe for disaster.
If UK police strategies have failed against football hooligans, evident of when one man was recently stabbed at a game between rival teams Millwall and West Ham, what hope could there be for Cyprus where police have declared they’re scared of arresting rampaging hooligans?