SPECTATOR SPORT
The battle of Marseilles
Simon Barnes
LONGTEMPS, je me suis couche de bonne heure. One of my better intros, though not altogether original, or true, alas, since my day-trip to Marseilles — 'Go and smell the flowers,' the Times sports ed said to me, meaning, presumably, les fleurs du mal to watch England play their first match in the World Cup meant a 3.30 start. So I travelled as a fan rather than a privi- leged press person, and felt much like the aesthete at the battle of the Somme — my dear, the noise, and the people! But the aes- thete never mentioned the bottles, a light haze of which fell around me as I walked from the stadium to the coach trying to remember the hard newsman's priorities in situations such as this: get on the plane as fast as possible and don't forget to save Your receipts. All along the Avenue du Prado before the match, chaps in England football shirts had been singing the Prado song: Prado vitt, animals, and we're Prado vitt, animals! This could be varied with the Windaloo' song, which celebrates this rare example of food as a virility test. I equipped myself with a Plate of non-virility-testing spaghetti at a restaurant on the Avenue du Prado, one almost free of the English, presumably because the rigours of the restaurant involved saying s'il vous plait and merci. I sat next to a fastidiously suited Frenchman, and made conversation in my ecolier French, saying pardonnez-moi for being anglais.
Then into the match, and it was quite clear that the French police had made a hash of security and had come up with a jury-rigged structure primarily designed to cover their own arses. This involved herd- ing us all into a crowded pen, while those at the back roared their fury and shoved. It was the most dangerous part of my day, and all the gift of the French police. 'You 'ave no bottles?' said the flic, flicking it through my hard newsman's paraphernalia of mobile phone, notebook and receipt for spaghetti. "Ave a nice day.'
I had a nice match anyway, sitting behind the goal. With this partisan view, both the geometry and the emotional forces of the game are quite different. I sat between a pleasant and knowledgeable chap with his shirt off and a pretty girl with her shirt on who giggled into a mobile phone.
After the match, things were enlivened by the shower of beer bottles. The Tunisians launched a mortar-style attack at the English across the great divide of the avenue. Why were all the bottles left there as missiles? Why had all the bottles been sold in the first place? It was inept policing, asking for trouble.
Meanwhile, down on the plage at the other end of the avenue, fights had broken out as ticketless fans watched the match on a big screen. Who started it? Who cares? A plage on both their houses. Trashing the Continent is an ancient English tradition. It was all predictable of course; a pity, then, that the French police failed to predict it. If you mix young men and beer and national- ism, you get fights. If the young men are English and you add football, then you get lots of fights. The Cartesian logic of this is ineluctable, but the French do not seem to have thought it through, shrugging their shoulders and blaming the — ridiculously blameworthy — English. Prado vitt, animals.
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