Algeria's 1-0 football win over Egypt in Wednesday’s World Cup qualifying play-off in Khartoum, was no doubt all the sweeter for the victorious team after the violence mounted against them on and off the pitch last week, when they were defeated 2-0 in Cairo.
However, neither country can feel proud of its fans. In both Marseilles and Algiers after the Egyptian team successfully leveled the aggregate score and forced the deciding match, Algerians rioted, attacking Egyptians and Egyptian-owned businesses. Indeed Algerian hooligans have been in evidence throughout the country’s World Cup qualification campaign. Some 71 people including three policemen were injured, some with serious stab wounds in riots that followed the October defeat of Rwanda in Blida.
Such behavior is completely unacceptable. Disturbingly, however, neither the Algerian nor the Egyptian authorities have taken much in the way of action against their country’s thugs. In Cairo football officials contradicted claims by media and the Algerian team that the players and management had been bombarded with lumps of concrete, claiming the missiles were in fact oranges. Well it certainly wasn’t a salvo of oranges that had shattered the windows of the Algerian team coach taking the players from the airport to their hotel two days earlier.
Why are the authorities in both countries apparently prepared to tolerate such lawlessness by so-called supporters of football? Even more to the point, why has not the sport’s governing body FIFA acted decisively against this hooliganism? It has a range of punishments that can be mounted against national football authorities, including ultimate disqualifying the national team from an international competition. One senior sports journalist yesterday made the cogent comment that if it had been a French or an English team bus that had been attacked by thugs or an international star such as David Beckham or Thierry Henry who had been injured by missiles hurled from the stands, the uproar from FIFA would have been immediate and immense. Instead because these were “just” Algerian and Egyptian players, the violence did not matter to anything like the same degree.
Inherent in this approach is the deplorable view that such behavior is only to be expected of countries such as Algeria and Egypt. The failure of the police and football authorities in both places to act decisively only lends support to this objectionable analysis. It’s time this nonsense was stopped. Football is just a game. Whether at national or club level, like all other sports, it is to be enjoyed as a spectacle of skill and daring. Supporting your country or local team is fine, if it is recognized that the only contest is out there on the pitch. There is no place for the thuggery of fans. Violence does not in any way support the team, does not support football and most seriously causes serious damage to the whole concept of sport. The arrival of big money may indeed have distorted football but has nothing to do with the crimes of loutish supporters. FIFA and football authorities everywhere, not just in Egypt and Algeria, must crack down on these morons.
