SolCampbell
11 things you (probably don’t) need to know about Portsmouth and Bolton Wanderers
Saturday, April 18th, 2009 | BWFC News, BWFC People, Chris Basham, Danny Shittu, Gary Cahill, Gary Megson, Johan Elmander, Kevin Davies, Matt Taylor | No Comments
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Your guide to all the predictions and Mystic Meggery ahead of Portsmouth v Bolton Wanderers
Reasons to be cheerful
1. Danny Shittu is a major doubt after being floored by Didier Drogba last week.
2. Matt Taylor, who has scored 10 goals so far this season, would love to show Pompey fans what they’ve been missing since they sold him – even if Gary Megson won’t let him be captain for the day.
Bolton Wanderers Hall of Shame #5: The Met Police
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 | BWFC People, Matt Taylor | 4 Comments
Throwing out disabled Bolton Wanderers fans at Upton Park was cowardly…
The small matter of policing a football match probably isn’t at the top of the Metropolitan police’s agenda right now, what with their boss being forced out of office by Boris Johnson and their trigger-happy anti-terrorist tactics against Jean Charles de Menezes three years ago being scrutinised by an inquiry.
But I thought their policing at the West Ham game on Sunday was pretty poor.
From the outset they made it clear they weren’t going to tolerate Wanderers fans making gestures or shouting obscenities in the direction of the West Ham fans. Before the game had even kicked off an officer had given verbal warnings to a couple of lads behind me.
I have no problem with that in theory. Nor was I concerned as the game went on and those same fans were ejected from the ground after failing to heed their warnings. Personally I prefer to watch the game than the opposition fans, having paid £35 to get in.
The problem is that if you’re going to make an example out of Bolton fans then you need to apply the same standards to the West Ham fans too, otherwise you just give the idiots an excuse to cause more trouble.
The Met’s tactics at Upton Park were in stark contrast to Fulham’s segregation policy a few weeks ago, where home and away fans were left to mingle both in the stand and the concourses. It worked pretty well except for when one drunken Fulham fan started taunting the Bolton fans by waving a scarf in their direction (the fan was thrown out by the stewards and the storm in a tea cup blew over pretty quickly).
Was this change in tactics (I assume the Met would also have overseen the policing at Craven Cottage) a response to the widely-reported racist taunts aimed at Sol Campbell by Spurs fans at Portsmouth a week earlier?
Who knows, but it was certainly clear that the police were focusing their efforts on the away fans. A couple of West Ham fans were thrown out towards the end of the first-half but many more went unpunished.
The incident that left a particularly sour taste in the mouth came towards the end of the match after one particularly eloquent West Ham fan started taunting two disabled Wanderers fans who were sat near the divide, shouting ‘shut the f*** up you f***ing spastics’ and doing the kind of impressions of disabled people that you usually see in primary school playgrounds.
I looked over at one of the police officers stood near me (he was wearing a cap rather than a helmet so I assume he was more senior) expecting him to instruct one of his men to go and eject the offending Hammer. Instead he stood listening and smirking for a while before eventually sending one of his officers over to issue a pretty tame telling off… to the wrong guy!
A few moments later, when Matty Taylor’s screamer went in, another West Ham fan ran 20 yards to shout more obscenities at the two disabled fans. This was by far the most aggressive act I saw by any fan all afternoon.
So what did the police do? That’s right, they threw out the disabled fans. It was pretty embarrassing really, watching them escort an elderly man on crutches out of the ground. It took them about five minutes just to get him up the stairs.
It was a cowardly decision and a very poor advert for a police force that could do with some good PR right now.
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