I walked through the city centre this morning and was angered by what i saw and smelt. As you can no doubt imagine 150,000 drunken football fans create a lot of mess...I walked along Cross Street and a man shouted out of his car window at some Rangers Fans, 'F**k Off back to Glasgow'. My city had offered hospitality and it had been abused.
I'm a great believer in hospitality and when that hospitality is abused it hurts. Maybe the police were heavy handed, it was unfortunate one of the TV screens failed to work. But when my TV has broken down I do not have a riot, i do not assault people, I do not threaten people...
Do I blame Manchester City Council? A bit....yesterdays headline in the MEN claimed the city would make £25 million from the day - tankers were arriving full of beer. Manchester maybe saw this as an opportunity to make a quick buck, and basically they got burnt.
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I think there’s quite a bit of diversity of opinion and possibly even confusion about the football mess (in every sense) last Wednesday night.
For what it’s worth, my own take is that it was evidently going to be scary and messy (just from what I saw at 8am!), that by 5pm I’d had enough (and sort of wished I’d gone home – if not for meeting Bret), was shattered and relieved after making it home that night. I’m seriously amazed none of us got hurt after S1 in the aftermath of the fighting/ bottle-throwing/ etc.
The mess (both litter and riot) were I think pretty inevitable from the off and the city should have done more to control/ prevent it before it kicked off, rather than using the police as a too-late final resort. The city’s pretty clean (but still smelly) now (it always had to be anyway in time for the 10k run on Sunday) and I think they did a decent job with that given the scale.
On top of that they’re now saying they’re not going to screen next week’s United game on big screens following the mess this week… I think a bad decision given that the logistics of even 20k reds is totally different to 200k Gers (ie no worse than a regular Utd or City game).
Some cheeky Manc on Manchester Confidential suggests that all the reds get on a bus/ train/ car/ plane to Glasgow and watch it up there instead!
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