- guardian.co.uk, Sunday July 15 2001 23.54 BST
- The Observer, Sunday July 15 2001
The police and the Football Association are bracing themselves for trouble at the game in Munich on 1 September, which England have to win to reach next year's World Cup Finals.
The FA has been given 6,000 tickets, but thousands more England fans plan to travel to Germany in the hope of getting into the Olympic Stadium, which holds 60,000 fans. Hundreds have already bought tickets for areas of the ground reserved for German fans, threatening plans for strict segregation of the crowd.
Troublemakers among both teams' supporters have been threatening to attack their rivals in a series of increasingly aggressive messages posted at internet hooligan websites. Both sides have pledged to assault the other.
Hooligan 'firms' who follow different English clubs such as Chelsea and Leeds United have been urging each other to set aside their often violent rivalries and join together to fight their German counterparts.
The xenophobic elements among England's supporters see the game as a chance to resume hostilities with Germans. 'Many people regard this as a World War Two reversal, with us invading them and taking them on in their own stadium,' said one English police officer involved in trying to prevent trouble.
Although the match has been sold out for months, scores of tickets for home supporters' sections of the stadium were still on sale to England followers this weekend from several websites and travel agents not licensed by the FA. Dozens are being snapped up daily, with fans paying up to £150 to secure a seat at England's biggest game in years.
Some England followers have even been able to buy tickets from the Olympic Stadium's website, in defiance of a ban on non-Germans buying tickets for home areas.
The National Criminal Intelligence Service last night delivered a blunt warning about the likelihood of disorder in Munich. Spokesman Mark Steels told The Observer: 'People should be rightly anxious about this game. It's clearly got all the elements which we recognise as making it potentially a high-risk game with trouble.
'It's a high stakes game, involving qualification for the World Cup. It's on a weekend in a place which is cheap and easy to get to. Tickets are reasonably plentiful for those prepared to pay the price. There's the old-fashioned enmities between the two countries, at least as far as some of their fans are concerned. And both countries have a well-known hooligan problem.'
There are fears that the evening kick-off could mean fans of both teams drink all day. Mark Perryman, who played a key role in the recent dismantling of the official England supporters club because so many of its members were aggressive or racist, said the match should start earlier.
'In Britain high-risk games such as Manchester United v Liverpool and Celtic-Rangers derbies kick off early in the day for public order reasons. It's absolutely ridiculous that that logic is not being applied to this match where there is clearly potential for things to go wrong,' said Perryman.
He urged the Government and the Football Association to ask Fifa, football's world governing body, to move the game forward to 1pm or 2pm to avoid trouble, and believes all 6,000 official England fans should have to show their photo ID membership cards to prevent fans with convictions entering the stadium.
The German team, like England, has a widely feared hard core of thugs among its followers. In an incident that attracted worldwide revulsion during the 1998 World Cup in France, four German fans beat a gendarme so severely that he was left brain-damaged.
The police hope that banning orders on around 480 known English troublemakers will stop many of those most likely to misbehave from travelling to Germany. They will have to surrender their passports to local police several days before the game.
Harald Stanger, a spokesman for the German FA, said he knew nothing about England fans buying black market tickets.
'The police will do all that's necessary to prevent trouble. I'm sure that the match is safe and that nothing will happen. There's no chance of a struggle or anything like that,' he said.
denis.campbell@observer.co.uk
Additional research: Paul Mills
