Italy - Scape Goat

After the crowd violence in Rome, the English speaking press were quick to blame the Italian police contingent for concentrating only on the away fans and ignoring the home fans, while using excessive force.

There is no doubt that there is a huge problem with crowd violence in Italy, there are a few issues here which need to be pointed out.

In the second round Man U fans were involved in crowd troubles at Lille. The English speaking press also focused on the actions of police saying that their actions were severe and made the problem worse.

And just hours after the game in Rome, Tottenham fans have been involved in violence at Sevilla, allegedly throwing chairs around, amongst other things, and apparently resulting in the hospitalisation of a police officer.

In all these cases English away fans are the common denominators. There is probably many reasons for this, but my point is that, while it may be easy to blame Italy because of its domestic problems, the violence seen in European competition recently is unrelated and that the UEFA investigations into these events will hopefully expose the real issues rather than take the easy, but false, route of the press and blame Italy.