It looks like yet another international football match has been marred by fan violence: the qualifier between Italy and Serbia was abandoned after seven minutes and a kick-off delayed for half-an-hour. The scenes from Genoa are not pretty, with Serbian yahoos making their nationalistic salutes, doing their best to tear up stadium barriers, and tossing incendiaries onto the pitch. It is particularly loathsome in that the pricing for the game was set to encourage families to bring their children, and many children were indeed in attendance. The disregard for human life is appalling.
The likely outcome for this is Serbia being banned from the competition at least and, so reports say, Italy awarded a 3-0 victory. The EU mavens may well be rethinking the implications of insisting on freedom-of-travel for Serbians as a condition of joining, and maybe rethinking getting Serbia to join at all. This is likely a large part of the point of the "fans" actions. They will go back home with their heads high, nursing their unfounded sense of Serbia being unfairly put upon by the rest of the world. Good riddance.
I'm all in favour of punishing the Serbian FA for the actions of their so-called fans. Still, where it the Italian responsibility here? Why should Italy be rewarded for poor crowd control? What struck me is that the scenes in the video clips I saw did not seem substantially different from what we see from the ultras in any important match involving Italian teams. The Italian FA and police have apparently long accepted fans bringing flares and fireworks into stadiums, and waving and tossing them, and have decided to solve the problem by not solving it at all: by wrapping fans in perspex cages and hoping they don't end up with a Heysel or Ibrox or Villa Park on their hands. That looks to me like an appalling disregard for human life also. Do we really have to wait for the next disaster before they act? Really? Shame on them, too.
