Move Champions League final from Stab City

Dailymail


It takes a special kind of idiocy for UEFA to continue pushing Rome as an acceptable venue for this season’s Champions League final.

Beautiful and romantic as it is, the character of the Italian capital changes when European football drops in among the relics and trattorias. Suddenly, the knives come out and the dimly lit, tree-lined streets around the Olympic Stadium become the scene for a sinister game of dare, with potentially fatal consequences.

It is why the city has long been established as a perilous place for visiting fans, a reputation confirmed during another disturbing week of assaults and stabbings.

Italian supporters ambushed one Arsenal bus, blocking its progress with a car, hurling stones and bottles at the windows, before slinging a burning flare inside the vehicle. In the scramble to escape, one supporter was knifed.

Despite being kept inside the ground after the final whistle for more than two hours for ‘their safety’ — yes, over two hours — supporters were attacked again on their way out. In the city, two other English fans were treated for head injuries, one suffering cuts to the face.

Arsenal, a club with no record of hooliganism among their followers in recent times, were so concerned about the threat of violence they took the precaution of texting emergency telephone numbers to every fan. It was a considerate and sensible touch and distinctly at odds with UEFA’s attitude, which can be summed up as little more than a shrug.

In the face of mounting criticism, UEFA blithely announced they will ask for an increase in the number of police on duty in Rome, but have no intention of relocating the game.

The reason? UEFA say: ‘Moving to another place would probably put the arrangements in danger. It would be less safe.’ This is patent rubbish. We haven’t even reached the quarter-final stage, with two months left to make fresh plans.

More likely, UEFA have already block-booked the top hotels and restaurants in Rome and would their corporate jolly disrupted. But only a fool would deny Italy has an enduring problem. In Turin, just 24 hours before the Arsenal assaults, two Chelsea fans were stabbed — in the buttocks this time, a particular specialty of this nation’s cowardly assailants.

The attacks were not what the authorities like to dismiss as ‘isolated incidents’ either. There is a catalogue of knife crime around the Olympic Stadium stretching back many years.

I can recall 14 Liverpool supporters being stabbed in Rome eight years ago. Three Middlesbrough fans were knifed in 2006 in a coordinated raid on a bar by the Ultras. A season later, a total of 16 Manchester United fans were stabbed and returned home forever bearing the scars of their visit to the Eternal City.



But when UEFA had a chance to proclaim how much they abhorred this habitual violence in Rome, what did they do? They handed the Champions League showpiece to ‘Stab City’.

It’s perfectly feasible that two English teams could meet in the final again, a combustible situation at the best of times, but infinitely worse when the city’s local hooligans regard the football party held on their doorstep as an invitation to slice and dice the visitors.

These knife crimes should be making headlines, yet a few paragraphs dotted about various news pages was about as excited as anyone seemed to get. Maybe the crimes committed by these scumbags are minor in the grand scheme of things — unless it’s your father or son in the casualty ward, that is.

But there is a game I always like to play in these circumstances. I try to imagine what the media coverage would be like if the situation was reversed.

Just pretend for a moment that, God forbid, Italian fans had been stabbed at Stamford Bridge. Or that a bus full of foreign supporters had been set upon with flares and rocks outside Old Trafford, with one suffering knife wounds.


Do you think that episode would have passed almost unnoticed? Or do you think the news would have been broadcast from Boston to Beijing, with television camera crews trampling over one another to interview the victims? Do you think it would merit a few paragraphs in the broadsheets, or do you suspect that MPs would be fighting one another to appear on Breakfast News urging an immediate ban, as UEFA launched a full inquiry into the ‘scourge of English hooliganism’?

There is no dispute we have our own cretins. Travelling abroad with an English club can be a source of great shame when you see some of the plankton we allow beyond our borders brandishing British passports. But our shortcomings should not stop us recognising dangerous negligence by others.

Despite claims they have improved in recent seasons, Italian policing at football events remains unashamedly basic. It’s baton charge first, ask questions later. A Premier League match might be a family experience, but an excursion to a Champions League match in many countries is simply too threatening to risk taking children.

Add in the downright inept stewarding at Serie A grounds, something I experienced for myself at the San Siro a fortnight ago, and the situation is often abysmal.

Not for everyone, of course. The line of UEFA courtesy cars and limos that snakes through the cordons under police escort remains untroubled by anything outside the tinted windows.

This, presumably, is why the governing body remains certain Rome will be a safe location for Europe’s football finale, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

What would make the UEFA committee sit up and take notice? A knife in the backside, perhaps? A death? It seems