Anger management

It's been an angry, angry weekend. In the south of France, puce men in adidas trainers fought running battles with police, locals and anyone else who'd take them on, while 7,630km away a man with issues walked into a nightclub and shot dead 50 people with an assault rifle, the kind intended for the battlefield.

On the back of these events, people rightfully became angrier still. In the one case, it was UEFA, the French interior minister, football pundits, normal fans, taxi drivers and the bloke to your right in the pub, all sounding off about the latest hooligan atrocity. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, America became ever-more divided across different fault lines: those in favour of gun control, those constitutionally against it; those who saw Omar Mateen's murderous spree in Pulse purely as a homophobic hate crime versus those who saw it purely as another Islamic terrorist attack, and those who saw it simply as another ocean of crimson on America's already blood-drenched record on gun crime.

The anger from Orlando even spilled over onto late night British TV: The Guardian writer Owen Jones stormed off the set of Sky News' review of the newspaper first editions as a discussion between him, anchor Mark Longhurst and columnist Julia Hartley-Brewer overheated as it began to compare Mateen's killing spree with the Bataclan attack by ISIS terrorists in Paris last November.

An increasingly agitated Jones saw the Orlando outrage purely as homophobic, though he acknowledged that it was also terrorism. "It is one of the worst atrocities committed against LGBT people in the western world for generations," he fumed at Longhurst and Hartley-Brewer, "and it has to be called out as such." You could see an angry microphone-shedding departure coming, and thus it did.

Opinions were divided on Twitter as to whether Jones, who had pre-warned on the very same medium before the show that he'd been wound up by events in Florida. Some felt Longhurst wasn't giving him fair voice, others branded Jones petulant and trying to politicise the attacks by accusing Sky of trying to deflect the homophobic angle (telling Longhurst that he did not understand "because he wasn’t gay").

Emotions were clearly running high. Jones made the correct view that, had the attack been on a synagogue, the media narrative would be one of anti-semitism. Longhurst bravely tried to push the case that the attacks weren't about any one interest, but that people had died in the nightclub, but Jones eventually decided "I've had enough of this. I'm going home, sorry." and removed his microphone and exited stage right. He was angry. Proper angry.

Twitter/Jon Sopel

Meanwhile, back on Twitter, full-scale lunacy was in flow. Reliably, presidential candidate Donald Trump waded in with a couple of his ill-considered statements, one which effectly tried to say "I told you so [about muslims]" while fake-modestly shying away from accepting any congratulations for doing so.

As usual it was all about him, and the bile from both anti- and pro-Trump tweeters took on a particularly caustic nature. With little encouragement, unsurprisingly, Trump inflamed further frenzied accusations of Islamaphobia and anti-Islamaphobia. Perhaps that's what he wanted. Further chaos in an already chaotic reaction.

Immigration, however, wasn't the only Trump fault line opened up: his views on gun control, once more repeating the view that had Pulse not been in a gun-free zone, people in the club would have been armed and able to defend themselves. Somehow, I think not. He peddled this same line in the wake of November 13. Having two good friends of mine get out of the Bataclan alive because there wasn't an all-out repeat of the OK Corral will remain one of the things in my life for which  I will be forever thankful.

The attackers in November had been supplied by their ISIS quartermasters. Mateen, on the other hand, had acquired, for a price somewhere around $700, an AR-15-style rifle, the civilian cousin of the American military's M-16 and M-4 assault weapons. Even in its civvie form, the AR-15, its derivatives and its clones, have a vicious rate of semi-automatic fire. An apparently trained shooter like Mateen would have been able to down many of his 50 victims In minutes with few of them knowing anything about it. Smartphone footage from outside the club attest to a rapid sequence of gunshots, something close to what a soldier would call suppression fire. In a crowded nightclub, much like a crowded music hall, that ammounts to cything people down.

And so the pro-gun lobby worked themselves into a frenzy, and the anti-gun lobby did likewise. In fairness, there are arguments on both side that carry water. But the question is, where does it end? At what point is it right that a murderously-inclined individual, with hate crime of any sort on his or her mind, can walk into a shop and, after handing over cash and a seemingly rudimentary amount of background checking transpires, walk out with a military-grade weapon? One, too, responsible for the deaths of 26 teachers and children at Sandy Hook primary school, 12 cinemagoers in Aurora, and 14 public employees in San Bernadino?

I understand the attraction of shooting as a sport. I have American friends who do it. I even have close relatives who have been practicing archers for as long as I can remember. I understand, too, that in many rural and remote parts of the United States, a rifle or a handgun is a necessary colonial throwback, a tool as commonplace as a pitchfork or a tractor. But that, somehow, doesn't discriminate for the murderous and the unhinged getting their hands on the self-same tools. That's why things had to change in Britain. Until Dunblane, firearms ownership was already strictly regulated. But on that occasion, Thomas Hamilton - killing sixteen school children and a teacher - led to the UK adopting some of the most stringent firearms regulations in the world. They may not have stopped gun crime in inner cities, but the blanket ban certainly put weapons designed for war out of the hands of those of diminished responsibility. A sad curtailment of a legitimate sport, but necessarily so.

There have, then, been many reasons this weekend-past for blood pressure to rise and tempers to flare. Acts of racism, xenophobia, knuckle-scraping on an industrial scale, homophobia, islamaphobia, hate and all the demons that bunk with it. But while people seek to pursue their causes and political agendas - no matter how worthy - we should also spare a thought for the 50 families now grieving for their sons and brothers. They may have been drawn from the LGBT community, and were also exclusively drawn from Florida's hispanic community, but they were also drawn from our community: human people. And that, more than anything else, is a cause worth getting angry about.

Why we shouldn't have been surprised...and nor should UEFA

Take the ingredients: England; the unfortunate reputation of some England fans; the port city of Marseille; the history of England supporters in Marseille; a fixture with Russia; the advanced intelligence that Russian 'ultras' were heading for Marseille in search of 'action'; a local community of disaffected youth relishing the prospect of a scrap. Add to the mix all-day drinking, a tired, jaded and nervous police force with a penchant for tear-gassing first, asking questions later. 

It hasn't exactly been a shock to see the sickening violence in the Mediterranean sunshine over this last weekend. The trouble is, those organising Euro 2016 shouldn't have been shocked, either. Moreover, they should have been better prepared for it. UEFA are probably doing the right thing in threatening the Russian and English football associations with ejection from the tournament if the disgraceful scenes in Marseille are repeated - what else can they do? - but then what did UEFA do to prevent them? Stopping football fans fighting is no easier than preventing any spontaneous bar brawl, but it could have been mitigated if the recipe's ingredients had been examined before the sun started to cook them into a bloody stew. The memory of 1998 should have been the first red flag when scheduling an England fixture in Marseille. But, then, threats from local youths, spoiling for a fight over their social situation and, potentially, global events, should have been another red flag. 

However, before we look for excuses, there's no escaping the fact that England fans, drinking from first thing in the morning, dressed in identikit combos of shorts and trainers, stripped to the waist and, by mid-afternoon increasingly belligerent, will have made themselves targets - either for the police (understandably jumpy given the apparent terror threat against Euro 2016) or for any locals wanting to 'defend' their turf. 

It shouldn't have to be this way, of course. The build-up to any football match should be enjoyed with a pint or two, even better with a blast of warm sun. But with England fans arriving in Marseille on Thursday for Saturday night's game, the potential for trouble was always there. What doesn't make sense is why bars around the Vieux Port were open and serving beer at 9am - exactly 12 hours before kickoff.

The drunken, casual xenophobia that accompanied some of the England fans on Thursday and Friday (the usual "no surrender to the IRA" songs, the ISIS goading and "ironic" World War Two references), however, pale into insignificance with Saturday's arrival in the port area by Russian thugs. By all accounts, it was like a military operation and it became clear they weren't just drunken yobs of a different hue. Some wore gum guards and MMA gloves. Some wore England shirts to blend in and confuse. Some had improvised weapons, including reports of a hatchet. Some England fans even noted that they were physically different, as if the special forces of hooligans had been unleashed. Clearly, this was no impromptu violence. This was as premeditated as it was possible to be. Which begs the question, why weren't the authorities better prepared to prevent it? A group of thugs that large doesn't organise itself without some intelligence spilling out.

Even more disturbing were the scenes in the Stade Vélodrome: after suicide bombers targeted the Stade de France last November, it is baffling as to how a flare gun was allowed into the England-Russia game, how a firework went off (chillingly echoing the sound of suicide vests being detonated seven months ago) and how a thin line of just 20 matchday stewards separated Russian and England fans given what had been going on in the town that day. The sight, though, of clearly motivated thugs charging at English fans - including women, children and the elderly - at the end of the 1-1 draw will and should set off alarm bells at both UEFA and FIFA headquarters.

Euro 2012 in Poland & Ukraine was marred by violent incidents involving Russian fans, with the Russian Football Union threatened then with severe sanctions by UEFA, on top of fines for specific acts of what amounted to outright nationalism. These events should have put the Russian Football Union under severe probation. Most of all, the staging of FIFA's 2018 World Cup in Russia must now be placed under the severest scrutiny. If extremist Russian hooligans can bring the sort of terror to Marseille as we saw last night, imagine what they would do on home soil?

I'm not, though, taking sides. English football hooliganism has never, truly, gone away. Thankfully, trouble at home and abroad has been severely mitigated by effective policing and planning. What has happened - and it would be naive to assume that it no longer does - takes place largely out of view and therefore unreported. Domestic games are now, thankfully, dry affairs, family entertainment-orientated, even (you do become impervious to the fruitier language). The days when I remember elements of the West Ham ICF appearing, threateningly, in the old family section at Stamford Bridge are long behind us.

But, whether it is just being reported more or is actually happening, there have been more incidents of old-style trouble at football matches in the UK in recent months. Which should have been another red flag to the prospect of Marseille repeating the chaos of 1998 and Charleroi in 2000. Perhaps, then, we've been lulled into a sense of false security, even if we should have been simply enjoying a behavioural change. The headlines in 1998 were justifiably despairing. The English club ban following Heysel had served to demonise football to some extent in England, but by 1998, eight years after the ban had been lifted, it was hoped that lessons had been learned.

In 2006 I went to several World Cup games in Germany, including all of England's, and couldn't have enjoyed a better experience. There was drinking, there was sunshine, there was singing (including the inevitable references to events between 1939 and 1945...), and there was, of course, the ever-present threat of trouble from agents provocateurs. But there was also supreme German organisation, and no sense of foreboding emanating from policing. It appeared that the combination of stringent law enforcement, intelligence gathering on known troublemakers and an appreciation by yobs that getting caught abroad will result in jail sentences was finally paying off. Now, one has to wonder whether the guard has been let down.

As has always been the case, those mixed up in the Marseille madness will be the minority. Most of the fans from both England and Russia will have been there for the football, the camaraderie and the banter, even if they are, to put it politely, "boisterous". Football fans enjoying a beer while discussing team selections will not attract media attention. Brawling, beer bottle-throwing, bloodied - or worse - fans, facing down notoriously heavy-handed riot police with their tear gas and water cannon, will. That shouldn't just be a stain on the reputations of the nations involved, but on those responsible for organising Euro 2016. Which is why if England and Russia are kicked out of the competition, UEFA will have to face some very severe questions indeed, because Germany and other host nations have demonstrated that you can stage a football tournament and not have it descend into violence.