No words needed.
West Ham versus Millwall.
The stuff that movies are made about. A clash of two old London rivals in the League Cup, the kind of draw that sets tongues wagging and thoughts creeping back to the horrible days of hooliganism at virtually every English football pitch.
Sadly, the violence and terror associated with the hooligan days came back today.
According to most reports, there was “organized violence” outside the pitch at the nearby Upton Park tube stop. The violence between supporters groups, with long-held animosity between the two groups, got out of control to the point that a man was stabbed in the chest. He’s in stable condition and likely will be okay.
The match itself was also marred with incidents, including at least two pitch invasions in extra time. Millwall had grabbed the lead just before the half, but West Ham equalized behind Junior Stanislas late in the match. It then went into extra time, where West Ham netted a penalty on a hand ball. After the penalty was taken and scored, a pitch invasion took place and play was suspended while order was restored. Once that happened, West Ham netted again almost immediately, and then held on to win 3-1.
The calls are already starting for the FA to identify all culprits and ban them for life from the grounds. To me, that sounds highly appropriate. There is no place in modern football for this sort of thing, and it saddens and angers me that this type of thing happened in 2009. I condemn both sets of supporters for this.
First, we have Davenport getting stabbed on Saturday, and now this…
Not a good week for the Hammers.
not forgetting collison’s dad killed in a motorcycle accident last weekend.
I don’t want to lay blame on one party in this – it’s both sides’ fault – but it seems that every time I’ve heard about football-related violence in the past few years, Millwall has always been at the center of it. Every damn time.
Something needs to happen to help their supporters (and other clubs as well) get their shit together, because this is absolutely unacceptable. No one should fear for their safety just because they’re attending a football match.
It would seem, from a distance, that both teams’ fans are involved in this particular instance of stupidity, so I won’t “blame” one side or the other for this instance. That said, why is Millwall seemingly ALWAYS involved in this kind of shit nowadays (say, last 5-10 years, when most of the game has already gotten “civilized”/”watered-down”? – however you choose to see the game)? Do the FA/police/authorities just not have enough balls to end this crap once and for all? It just shouldn’t be that hard…
I was going to throw a “Millwall and West Ham being Millwall and West Ham” threadjack into the last post, but this post captures most of what I’m thinking. You’d think that with CCTV they’d be able to ID everyone they’d need to in pretty quick fashion.
From now on, any game featuring any combination of West Ham, Leeds, and Millwall should be held behind closed doors. Millwall-Leeds degenerated into some craziness around the League One playoffs, if I remember right.