This is the funniest shit I've read for ages.
https://www.unibet.co.uk/blog/footb...e-1.1037783?mktid=52:5211000020:odds_02062018
Why the attack on Manchester City’s coach is a continuing outrage
Stephen Tudor - 16 days ago
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Liverpool FC was fined £17,500 for fans attacking City’s team bus – hardly a deterrent sufficient in ensuring that this never happens again
TO recap. Two days after the draw was made earlier this year pairing Manchester City with Liverpool in a Champions League quarter final, a flyer circulated online entitled ‘coach greeting’.
The flyer was broken down into ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’ and in the first section it urged Reds to: ‘Bring your flares and flags. Banners and bangers. Pints and pyro’. It challenged a fan-base to ‘scare’ their visitors ‘back to Mancland’. It was in essence a call to arms and concluded with a suitably truculent declaration: ‘We’re going to show them exactly what money can’t buy’.
This was hardly the first time that Liverpool supporters had staged such an event and usually the assembly of thousands of fans down Arkles Lane and along Anfield Road ahead of a meaningful European fixture, rumbustiously cheering on the arrival of their team and vociferously booing the opponents was an admirable sight. Only this time – clearly, obviously, undeniably – it was of a far more bellicose nature. From hundreds of tweets that I personally saw I don’t recall the Liverpool coach being mentioned even the once.
On March 19th – a full sixteen days before the first leg at Anfield was due to commence – the Manchester Evening News ran an article headlined: “Liverpool fans are planning a hostile – and potentially illegal – welcome to the Manchester City team coach”.
It is worth lingering on this for a moment. It really, really is. A fortnight prior to a highly combustible all-English Champions League game a newspaper wasn’t speculating on the possibility of trouble. They were sure enough to state its intention as fact and identify the means.
A day later it was reported that Manchester City had expressed concerns to Greater Manchester Police who in turn relayed their comments to Merseyside Police and when this became public knowledge Liverpool fans on Twitter momentarily ceased whipping themselves into frenzy and broke down in collective derision. “Haha City concerned about coach greeting from LFC fans. If they’re so worried don’t come to Anfield soft c***s”. That was one response and without exaggeration there were hundreds worse and hundreds more in a similar vein.
We were now in surreal territory where City were regarded as being cowardly for not wanting their squad of players, manager and staff hopelessly exposed to a hate-mob of pissed-up zealots armed with smoke-bombs and pyrotechnics and stones and bottles; a mob fuelled by one-upmanship in who loathed these infidels the most and who were prepared to intimidate them the most. City, it transpired, weren’t playing fair in wanting to take their team to an away ground and play a game of football in a cup competition without being attacked. This apparently was their due, their enforced rite of passage and for Reds this was their right.
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Oliver Kay
✔@OliverKayTimes
Liverpool fined €20,000 for “crowd disturbances” at Champions League QF 1st leg. This would appear to include the attack on the Manchester City bus
4:28 PM - Jun 4, 2018
Nobody has quite managed to explain the logic in this and especially in an era of complete clampdown in modern football where a fan jumping over an advertising hoarding and being in the vicinity of the players can expect to receive a lengthy banning order. How on earth then was it Liverpool’s right to essentially form a lynch-mob and vandalise a coach containing these same players?
The answer of course lay in the sense of the vast majority and their naivety in presuming that everybody else shared that sense. Because unquestionably most of the Liverpool supporters who congregated close to Anfield hours before kick-off to ‘greet’ the away team coach did so with the intention of putting the fear of God into City through noise only. And that’s precisely what they did. Only the few ruined it for the many. Because that’s what they do. Always and without exception.
That is why I’m not allowed to drink a pint of lager at my seat at the Etihad. Or why the unassuming guy sitting next to me can’t either, or for that matter the entire row. Because somewhere in another row an excitable loon will get battered on watered-down pish throughout the match, become boisterous and cause a problem for the match-day security.
In this instance then, with thousands of supporters ramped up on hatred and incited to intimidate, and full of alcohol and brandishing illegal pyrotechnics (‘pints and pyro’), glass bottles and smoke-bombs it was inevitable that the few would ruin it for the rest and physically attack the coach. It wasn’t just likely. It was inevitable.
With this inevitability so highly publicised it was reasonable then to expect the police to intervene. I mean after all you can barely fart in sight of a ground these days without incurring a warning. Stand up and hurl abuse at a player and say bye-bye to your season card.
Instead, in the hours leading up to kick-off and with Reds going full-on Lord Of The Flies at this point – conversely insisting they were ‘European royalty’ and old hands at this, unlike City, while simultaneously acting like it was the biggest thing to happen to them in their whole existence - the Merseyside Police saw reason to announce a late change of route for the bus. You know, just in case anyone missed it. There is an anecdotal report of a police officer admitting they were so short of numbers they were powerless to prevent what happened despite this being a category C+ game with an ambush of the opposition coach planned in plain sight on social media in the weeks leading up to it. When a subsequent complaint was made by a Blue, the officer who took the call delighted in making a string of sly references to Liverpool having made the semi-finals. There is an image of a police officer watching the wanton vandalism as gormless as you like while behind him a group of supporters stand on his police van brandishing illegal pyros.
There were no arrests made on the evening directly concerning the attack on the City coach and no arrests have been made since.
When Manchester City requested an alternative route to the ground, in a late desperate bid to prevent the inevitable, it was denied them.
All told this was not just a failure from the Merseyside Police to comply with their duty of care. This was tantamount to complicity. To aiding and abetting.
And what they aided and abetted was disgraceful and disgusting scenes that saw the Manchester City coach under sustained attack. Bottles rained down. A pyro landed on the roof of the coach briefly sending it aflame (six weeks later the Red Star Belgrade bus was razed to a shell from a similar flare). The players converged in the central aisle as objects smashed against the windows. A video taken by City coach Manuel Estiarte is damning, utterly damning.
The damage was so severe a replacement vehicle was required to take the team home.
“I appreciate what you have done,” Pep Guardiola sarcastically said to some nearby stewards as he emerged shaken from the ordeal. The police meanwhile watched on gormlessly.
Recap over and given the lack of condemnation – or indeed acknowledgement – from the media in the aftermath to the incident (and furthermore a complete absence of remorse from Liverpool bar some welcomed words from Jurgen Klopp and Steven Gerrard and an apology from an old Red in a pub who said that wasn’t the Liverpool he knew and loved) it is fair to suggest that City fans were placing a lot of stock in the awaited UEFA findings. After all City were once fined £25,000 for taking to the field of play one minute late against Sporting in 2012 while Besiktas were fined an identical sum this week for a cat getting onto the pitch.
Surely then some headline-grabbing retribution would be forthcoming. Enough to make the uninformed informed and a deterrent sufficient in ensuring that this never happened again.
Last week, for setting off fireworks, throwing objects, acts of damage, and crowd disturbances Liverpool football club was fined £17,500. It is the equivalent of a ninth of Virgil van Dijk’s weekly wage.
When Manchester City fans boo the Champions League anthem next season condemn it all you wish. But don’t be surprised.
