Most liked posts in thread: Pyro's

I live in Amsterdam. For Ajax v Feyenoord away fans are not allowed to the games. In fact, there is a ‘ban’ on any supporters/people wearing opposition colours and clothing within a certain radius of the city (inc public transport) - don’t know the reality of how this is policed.

These are indeed extreme and isolated examples of managing negative crowd related issues and of course not relevant to what we experienced last night. However the sentiment I am getting at is that the above 3 points can be considered as well as points deductions, however ultimately they rarely achieve the desired effect.

The club needs to start by becoming way more strict on this and managing cause before it occurs, rather than the aftermath.

I get to watch all home and away games via iFollow, my only ‘live’ game this season came on the weekend at Northampton where I took my daughter for her first City game, sat (as a guest) amongst the home fans. I miss the days of stood amongst City fans however in current times i have absolutely ZERO incentive to take my kids to a Bradford game (home or away) sat amongst our own supporters. It kills me to say this, but when I see and hear examples such as last night and Hartlepool away last season, I become more deterred than attracted as the potential experience seriously isn’t worth it, and I don’t want my kids to be exposed to this.

Club need to take this seriously and consider what the impact of some of the recent years ‘business’ decisions (eg ticket prices) are having on the bigger picture.

Sad, cause this is a small isolated group of morons having a big impact now off and on the field.

Over to you Sparks…..

 

The drone could be see from behind the goal. It must have been a police drone as it was there all game.

 

You are being naive in thinking the no pyro no party brigade give a toss about what others think. After all it gets them likes on twitter and youtube and something to brag about in the school yard come Monday.

 

I bring a small bag, 7x4 inches and it is searched every time. Lipstick, tissue and phone. I sit in the Exe seats and I haven’t seen any in that section throwing pyro’s. They are coming in via the kop, use the searchers where they are needed.

 

Once upon a time kids respected police, teachers, parents or any kind of person in authority.
Then the PC brigade took control and took away all forms of discipline.
Now we can only imagine a world where people follow rules and toe the line. That was lost about 4 decades ago.

 

What a load of complete and utter bollocks. When exactly was this mythical golden age? People have been complaining about the activities of young people forever and suggesting that it represents some kind of breakdown in society. The 'flappers' of the 1920s 'jazz age' were supposedly the end of the world as they knew it and represented a complete disregard for societal norms and authority.

I was born in 1956 and as long as I can remember there have been people twisting, bending and breaking the rules at football matches and in society in general. Going to matches in the early 70s was a far more hazardous experience than it is now. And there were riots going on at football matches back into the early decades of the 20th century. Do you think the teddy boy razor/knuckle duster gangs of the 50s or the mod/rocker battles of the 60s were evidence of respect for authority?

All those Social Enquiry Reports I wrote for Juvenile Court in the 80s - 4 decades ago - for kids nicking cars, shoplifting and breaking into houses, didn't suggest to me that we were living in an age of respect for authority and rule-following.

Teenagers today are essentially no different than they've always been. If anything, most are pussycats compared to those who grew up in the harsh industrial conditions of yesteryear. If pyros had been widely available 40/50 years ago you can be certain that they'd have been thrown at matches instead of coins and bog rolls.
None of which excuses the actions of the idiots throwing pyros, who I've already vented my spleen about in an earlier post. But to suggest that this is evidence of a wider breakdown in law and order is just nonsense and is simply not supported by the facts - it's just rose tinted nostalgia for a mythical better time.

 

No one here is excusing the use of pyros or denying that youth crime in general is a problem. But it has been so for far longer than anyone alive today can remember.
Suggesting that it now represents some kind of breakdown in societal norms and respect for authority etc simply ignores the historical fact that people have been saying the same about teenage behaviour since long before the era that you are holding up as a better time.

 

Any moron who sets one of these things off in a pub needs to be identified on CCTV and charged. I understand the pub was evacuated and the fire service was called. That kind of action shouldn't go unpunished to the morons involved.

Thinking back, was the person who threw one from the top of the kop which hit the little girl on the lower tier against Newport ever identified?

Footage of the pub Saturday, I believe this previously happened at Sunderland.

 

Ok I’ll re-phrase.
It’s against ground regulations to persistently stand in seated areas at football stadiums.

personally I don’t really give 2 shits about pyros but it does piss me off when people stand up infront of me and my family (some of whom are children or elderly) and thus spoiling my enjoyment / view of the game in lieu of their own personal preference and enjoyment.

 

Like it or not it's an age thing with these kids seeing the scenes from abroad and thinking they will add to the game and generate a better atmosphere by throwing pyro onto the pitch or letting them off amongst their own fans.
I don't know what the answer is apart from better stewarding outside before these clowns get into the stadium the stewards know the age group of these morons yet I've seen middle aged women asked to open their handbags and old men frisked before entering the stadium maybe they don't want any agro that stopping these morons entering the ground may cause.
Unfortunatly as some have said its becoming a normal experiance for the few and a worring part of supporting Bradford City away from home.

 

I don’t understand why these so called fans are not arrested? The club should issue a statement to effect that any person using fireworks will receive a lifetime ban no exceptions. This type of behaviour requires very firm handling by both the Police and the Club.

 

The curse of the last minute goal. Funny how out fans weren't complaining about the time added.on in the Northampton game. The last three games have had crazy finishes and to be fair we haven't played that well in any of them. Take Cooky out of this team and we'd be mid table mediocrity, even if we do go up that team needs some serious work on it in terms of recruitment.

 

As always it goes as follows:

This forum - almost everyone is against these idiots.

Facebook - many against the behaviour and flares but also many idiots condoning it because it “intimidates the other fans and adds to the atmosphere”

Twitter - absolute idiots thinking it’s amazing

 

The solution is to stop selling away tickets on general sale.
This behaviour only happens at games like Rochdale / Crewe / Oldham etc. where it’s a local game with large away capacities.
Didn’t see it at Gillingham or Crawley.

 

Absolutely!

This book was the basis of his lectures in the early 80s.

Hooligan: A history of respectable fears https://amzn.eu/d/561QTh0

Read the reviews. It basically mirrors this discussion!

And from the Goodreads reviews:

"This is Pearson's point, of course. The law-and-order debate is always the same, and always entirely ahistorical. The nation is always under threat from youth gone wild. The liberals are always mollycoddling them. The root is always foreign influence, judicial softness, and undeserved luxury. The solution is as obvious as the cause: as one Tory MP confidently asserts, “If birching and short sentences will not stop it, then more birching and longer sentences will have to be tried”

And equally consistent is the proof these firebrands give. Merely cast your mind back a generation or two and you'll recall that Britain was more peaceful, more respectful of authority, more stable, and so on. This constant desire for happier and simpler times gives Pearson the structure for his book, which is unusual - a history told in reverse chronological order. For each generation he humours the reactionaries and jumps back twenty or thirty years, as instructed, starting with the 1950s. Lo and behold, we meet again and again youthful crime sprees, horrified conservatives, gangs on the rampage, soft-hearted philanthropists, and the same instruction: just look back a generation, to when things were fine.

The reverse chronology works a treat in letting us see reactionaries frothing over more and more innocuous things - there's a marvellous section on the horror of the bicycle and its ability to let working-class people loose across the British countryside. We see how disgust at 80s football fans is contrasted with rosy memories of sporting tradition, then when we reach the origins of that tradition - oh what a surprise, the same newspapers hated that too. We see shifting definitions of the Others corrupting English life - immigrants, Americans, the Irish, the continentals ("a state of affairs intolerable even in Naples!") and a constant depressing drumbeat of complaints that the working classes turn to crime because they have it TOO good. Even Pearson's sardonic demeanour is shaken when he finds Victorians denouncing the workhouses and slums as plagued by excess luxury.

Pearson's concluding chapter tries to make some sense of this, and it's difficult, because the conservatives making these arguments are so often just plain acting in bad faith. The ahistorical claims are the point - the arguments aren't meant to be a proper explanation of the situation, and the people they're aimed at believe them already. This is why "Respectable Fears" can never be assuaged, and always recur - a Pearson of today would wearily roll his eyes at talk of 'New Elites', cultural Marxism, the panic over trans people or small boats, and the barbarising effects of social media. The rhetoric and tactics never vary. Even if it peters out near the end, Hooligan's historical journey through what we now call "normal island" is worth taking."

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/5508584

I always had a soft spot for Geoff Pearson. Liked a pint or three with his students and gave me a first for my essay on 'Youth Culture: A Comparative Study of Mods, Skins & Punks".
He, sadly, died in 2013. I think I might just buy meself a copy of 'Hooligan' and read it again for old times sake.

 

That is indeed a simple solution. So simple, in fact, that isn't likely to be effective. We know from decades of criminological research that simply hiking up the sentences/sanctions rarely, if ever, works to reduce offending rates. By far the bigger deterrent is the likelihood of getting caught. And that's where the problem arises, because it's very difficult to stop the pyros being smuggled in without doing intimate searches. And even if you were allowed to do that, how many innocent youths would you need to strip search to catch the one who is smuggling them in? It's clearly an excessive measure. So the kids know they can get them into grounds with impunity. And it seems that it is very difficult to identify individual throwers in big crowds of kids all wearing similar dark Stone Island gear. If it was simple to crack this problem, it would have been sorted by now. But it clearly isn't simple

 

Ironically the same morons letting off pyros will be the first ones chanting about "the 56". As the Yanks would say, "go figure."

 

I struggle to comprehend just what the attraction with the damn things is? It's not like coloured smoke improves the atmosphere. Let's hope that they're a fad that goes away sooner rather than later. A couple of hefty fines/bans for letting one off might dissuade the yoot from continuing with them. Although, from watching the highlights of games up and down the country, they seem to be pretty much ubiquitous regardless of team or league.

 

Because they all watch YouTube videos of continental Ultras and see them setting them off and think its cool. Plus they'll all post on social media clips of it and get 'likes' from their mates....