West Ham violence - the return of the repressed

My grandfather supported Millwall; my father West Ham.

From an early age I understood that the rivalry between these two clubs, which drew much of their support from the tough Cockneys who worked in the docks on each side of the river, was fierce and unceasing.

I was used to hearing about the fights that would take place between fans whenever their clubs met.

Back then Millwall fans were especially reviled. The club drew its support largely from run-down Deptford and Catford and from the desolate south-east London suburbs. The fans thrived on a kind of wounded resentment.

"No one likes us," they chanted, "but we don't care." Of the London clubs Millwall fans were among the most feared and certainly the most insistently racist.

My grandfather always spoke sorrowfully of how his son, who was born in Upton Park but later moved out to Essex, had "betrayed" him by supporting West Ham.

He urged me not to make the same mistake. In the event, in my own act of Oedipal betrayal, I chose to support Arsenal.

The oddity of our family was that son did not follow father in his team of choice: Millwall, West Ham, Arsenal, each time a slight geographic and social distancing.

When I started going to watch football in the Seventies, first with my father and then later with friends, the expectation was that I would encounter violence, on the standing terraces and outside the ground.

A sense of danger came to be part of the thrill and the fear of the match-day experience. Over the years I was caught up in pitch invasions, charges and crushes.

One of my closest boyhood friends became so intoxicated by the visceral, violent possibilities of fandom that he ended up in the ICF, the hardcore firm of West Ham hooligans, and, later, following a riot on a cross-channel ferry, in prison.

I thought of him on Tuesday night when I first heard about the clashes between West Ham and Millwall fans.

The violence, said sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe, was a "disgrace to football".

One stabbing, a few thwarted pitch invasions and 13 arrests: compared with the years before the advent of the Premier League, since when football has successfully excluded the urban poor and remade itself as the beautiful game, adored by the international plutocracy, what happened on Tuesday night was minor.

But it was shocking all the same, precisely because such events are now so rare, certainly at the highest level in the Premier League, where going to a football match can be as comfortable and benign as going to the theatre - and much more expensive.

"We have made great progress in tackling hooliganism in this country and will not tolerate a return to the dark days of the Eighties," Sutcliffe said.

Anyone who knows football knows that there is likely to be trouble whenever Millwall and West Ham meet.

For a start, because they are in different divisions, the two clubs play each other infrequently.

The events on Tuesday night would have been carefully co-ordinated, with rival fans communicating in advance via the internet about where they would meet to fight and when.

What should be remembered, too, is that some men like fighting as much as they like drinking.

In one sense, what we witnessed outside and inside Upton Park stadium was the return of the repressed, the return of all those fans who have been shut out in the new era of prohibitively high ticket prices, smart all-seater stadiums and the money-glamour of our globalised Premier League.

It was a Carling Cup game and, therefore, tickets would have been available to irregulars and non-season ticket holders.

The Hammers versus the Lions, for the nutters and the scrappers it was an opportunity too good to miss.

I could not have been alone in predicting a riot, especially during this time of economic hardship; football violence in England was at its peak during the blighted, recessionary years of the Seventies and early Eighties, periods of high unemployment and social fragmentation.

There was a psychological connection between the violence on the terraces and what was happening in the culture at large.

Today, football is at the very centre of our celebrity and entertainment culture, a symbol of aggressive meritocracy and of a deracinated cosmopolitanism.

Yet there remains a powerful nostalgia for fans of my generation for a lost, less aggressively commercial era of football, when there was a sense of greater connection between those who played the game professionally and those who watched or wrote about it.      

But nostalgia can be dangerous: you remember sweetly but not always well or with clarity.

On Tuesday night it was not only hooliganism that returned to top-flight football; there was racism.

For the first in a long time friends of mine who were at Upton Park heard black players being jeered and traduced; in particular, Millwall thugs directed monkey chants at West Ham and England striker Carlton Cole, in a repulsive cacophony of loathing. Such chants were once commonplace.

In the spring of 1985, a rampage by Liverpool supporters before the start of the European Cup Final at the Heysel Stadium in Belgium led to the collapse of a wall inside and the death of 39 Juventus fans.

The next morning, Margaret Thatcher said: "There are no words, there are no justifications; the blame is entirely for England."

The blame for Tuesday night's violence remains entirely for England, since it was an expression of the vulgarity and brutality of wider society.

But there will be no turning back to the ways of old. Too much has changed, definitively, about English football since then for the better, and, in addition, West Ham-Millwall matches have a tension that is peculiarly and dangerously their own, as I discovered from a very young age.

Jason Cowley is editor of the New Statesman and the author of The Last Game: Love, Death and Football, published by Simon & Schuster, price £14.99.