Shifting the blame !

 While a British minister declared the other day that Boris Johnson was in “yellow card territory” over allegations of partying during lockdown, the French satirical weekly “Le Canard Enchaîné” in its latest edition, promptly held up a red card to the French police for their chaotic and heavy-handed crowd management on the night of the Champions League final at the Stade de France in Paris. And that is not the whole story by far. The French authorities in general and Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior in particular, have since engaged in a momentous exercise of shifting the blame. After the “incidents” at the entrance to the Stade de France, during which many Liverpool fans were prevented from getting into the stadium, delaying the kick-off by over 30 minutes, the message consistently pumped out by the French authorities has been that the Liverpool fans had only themselves to blame by turning up late and trying to get into the stadium without tickets or with counterfeit tickets.  On Monday morning, after a hastily convened meeting of the organisers at Stade de France, ministry officials and senior police officers, the Minister gave a press conference in which, while apologising for the chaos, he went even further in the blame game by claiming that the Liverpool fans were responsible for a “organised fraud on an industrial scale” to the tune of 30 000 to 40 000 fake tickets.

 

For anyone wearily familiar with the French tendency to blame the British or, as they always say, even if, for once, the description was accurate, “les anglais”, for many things, particularly in relation to football, it was interesting to hear the other side of the story on a BBC radio news programme on Sunday morning.  Many Liverpool fans reported that they had been prevented from getting into the stadium because there weren’t enough gates open and that the automatic turnstiles didn’t work; many complained of police “twitchiness”, others of being sprayed with tear gas – an accusation duly substantiated by numerous short video extracts on social and even mainstream media. Others said that they had been surrounded and mugged by local youths, variously described as “thugs” and “gangs”, both before and after the match, when the police had largely disappeared.

 

 

Herein seems to lie one of the keys to the disorders that occurred and of which Liverpool fans, far from being the instigators, were largely the victims. The police “twitchiness” and readiness to spray tear gas on fans waiting at the turnstiles seems to have been caused by the presence of large numbers of local youths who took advantage of the technical hitches and long queues to jostle unsuspecting fans and try and steal tickets and phones; some were captured on video climbing over the high railings to enter the stadium. The same youths also seem to have preyed on fans leaving the ground after the match, carrying out muggings and robberies. It was subsequently reported that 100 people were arrested and taken into police custody. By Monday morning, 20 were still being held. None of them were English. The next day, the news came that six people, all of them French, had been charged with mugging and robbery and would appear in court.

 

 

A contributing factor to the presence of so many local youths wanting to watch the match in the stadium may have been the fact that the Real Madrid star striker, Karim Benzema, was playing that night. Benzema, one of the most talented strikers of his generation, is a bit of an outlier among French professional footballers. He was born in a poor suburb of Lyon of Algerian parents. Talent spotted at an early age, he entered the First Division Olympique Lyonnais training centre before graduating quickly to the first team and helping the club win a number of trophies in France before transferring to Real Madrid in 2005, where he is now the team captain and one of the artisans of its recent string of successes. However, although he played for the French national team early in his career, his attachment to France has often been in question and contributed to his being dropped from the team for a fairly long period. To the disappointment and disbelief of his many fans, he was not selected for the French squad that won the World Cup in 2018.  One of the problems for the national coach is that he has never concealed his emotional allegiance to his Algerian origins and has consistently and conspicuously abstained from singing the French national anthem at the start of international matches. Such attitudes have come in for a lot of criticism, especially from right-wing politicians who have always had an axe to grind about immigration from former French colonies in North Africa, particularly Algeria. Didier Deschamps, the French national coach, stated that he left Benzema out of the squad in 2018 on “purely sporting grounds” but Benzema himself went on record as saying that he believed Deschamps had yielded to the pressure of “racists”. However, given his sporting performances at Real Madrid it was difficult for Deschamps not to recall him, which he has duly done, and he will undoubtedly be in the squad for the next World Cup in Qatar, where France will attempt to retain its world title. Away from the pitch, Benzema has also been embroiled in a couple of court cases, one of which involved the attempted blackmail of a former team-mate that earned him a one-year suspended sentence.

 

In short, the combination of pure talent and a transgressive, anti-establishment streak has made him into somewhat of an idol for second and third generation immigrants of North African origin in France and he enjoys a huge following on social media.

 

There is absolutely no suggestion of course that Benzema even suspected what was going on outside the stadium as he was preparing to lead his team onto the pitch for the most prestigious final in European football. But his presence at such a high-profile match may well have been an additional magnet for his many followers among the disaffected young men living in the area around the Stade de France. Interestingly, no disorders of this magnitude have been reported at previous football or rugby matches or concerts which are regularly staged in this stadium.

 

It has emerged this week that the Ministry of the Interior was warned about possible “public order disturbances” and the “circulation of fake tickets” three days before the match. A strike on one of the metro lines leading to the stadium as well as the technical problems with scanning tickets at the turnstiles probably set up the conditions for the chaotic scenes around the stadium in the run-up to the match. However, admitting to frequent lawlessness in the areas around the stadium, or that the police were  heavy-handed and clumsy in their handling of the crowds or even, however obliquely mentioned, that the integration “of certain populations”  is still a  big problem around Paris and other large cities, would be unthinkable for the French authorities, just two weeks before crucial parliamentary elections in which the radical left-wing alliance headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the far right Rassemblement National of Marine le Pen seem likely win many more seats than they previously held.

 

In the circumstances, it was far more expedient to lay the blame at the door of English football fans who in general do not enjoy a favourable image in French public opinion. We have learned more recently that the French government, in an attempt to mend fences and make up for publicly uttering manifest untruths in the days after the match, has sent three English-speaking police officers to Liverpool to gather evidence of wrongdoing and allow fans to lodge formal complaints before the French courts.  

 

Be that as it may, once the media circus has moved on, vox populi will be happy to conclude that the whole uproar was caused by “English” football fans up to their usual tricks!