THE Italian police are brutal, the Ultras are out of control. Manchester United fans had the misfortune to be caught between the two and were utterly blameless. So you'd think by reading much the press coverage today of last night's violence at the Roma-Manchester United game, where United's fans are portrayed as meek little lambs to the slaughter.
Yet last week I went to the Scotland-Italy match in Bari, where there was not a hint of last night's trouble. It was the same story last month when Celtic played in Milan. Why the utterly different scenarios in a country where football violence is supposedly a nationwide scourge?
Perhaps the reputation of English fans precedes them, and the carabinieri and the Ultras fancied testing their mettle. But few commentators seem to have considered another factor; for all the efforts to prevent known hooligans travelling abroad, there remains among some English fans a confrontational, no-one-likes-us-we-don't-care attitude, a volatile disdain for the host country.
I write from experience of Frankfurt last summer where, for all the credulous media coverage about a new breed of friendly English fans, the overriding memories of being among tens of thousands of white-shirted beer guzzlers are of leering chants about how the RAF "from England" shot down German bombers, and bobbing past the spittle of pumped up teenage boys bellowing that there would be "No surrender, no surrender to the IRA". Far from a league-of-nations togetherness, I saw Germans looking nervously over their shoulders any time a group of ruddy-faced drunkards stumbled past.
The glossy new vision of English football that Sky and other marketeers have peddled over the last 15 years has no room for unsavoury violence, and it seems that most pundits have taken this spin as fact. The Sun is the most strident defender of the English male abroad, whether he's in fatigues or an acrylic replica top, and today went for the default headline of "Brutal cops beat Man U fans." The internet allows dissenting voices on Rupert Murroch's baby, however, and one Italian fan who claims to have been at the game suggested that United fans were responsible for much of the trouble by throwing objects into the Roma end after the Italians had scored the opening goal; "Hooliganism is in the English DNA," he suggests.
None of which is to excuse police brutality or Italian thugs, or to take sides in apportioning blame for last night's scenes. But our friends down south are mighty complacent, not to say a little deluded, if they truly believe the English disease has been cured.