Dan Jones: After this flare-up, will the FA ban buses, pasties and exciting play?

 
ASSISTANT REFEREE David Bryan HIT BY FLARE FROM TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR FANS ASTON VILLA V TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR FC BARCLAYS PREMIER LEAGUE 20/10/2013
SPORTSPHOTO LTD
24 October 2013

Bonfire night is coming, kids, so here’s some advice. Don’t throw lit fireworks at your friends, your pets, your mother-in-law or the linesman at a football match.

Okay, so I’m joking about the mother-in-law, give her hell — but everyone else, there’s a rule: if it’s on fire and emitting colourful smoke, try not to hurl it at other sentient beings.

Right, right, I agree, it shouldn’t be necessary to pass on this warning but we’re talking about Premier League football here, where the big news of last Sunday’s match between Aston Villa and Tottenham was that a cretin, or cretins unnamed, threw a flare at a lino: the flare clocked the poor sod just above the shoulder blades and fell to the turf, where it emitted a plume of blue smoke then eventually went out.

One result of this is that two blokes have been arrested and released on police bail, which is fair enough.

The other, much more depressing result is that we have had to listen to a lot of dreadful, po-faced jaw about how flares are dangerous, flares are bad, flares are really hot and could cause a fire, flare use is up by 140 per cent year on year, etc etc, all of which means flares should be banned. Like, now!

Do you find it astonishing that someone has been sitting down counting flare-related offences at football matches over time? I do, but I guess that’s by the by. That 140 per cent figure, allied with the photographs from last weekend’s match, means that the Football Association and various top-ranking rozzers have been able to condemn flare use, suggesting that it is as pernicious as drink driving and might one day cause a disaster as terrible as Hillsborough.

Well, if you say so, rozzers and blazers. If you say so. Now, I am not a habitual flare user but I know some people believe filling a stadium with thick red or blue fumes creates a ‘continental’ atmosphere.

This seems to mean that by lighting a flare you can kid yourself that rather than watching two mid-table teams duke it out on a wet afternoon in the Black Country you are in fact watching Borussia Dortmund play Galatasaray in a Champions League quarter-final — if only because the smoke makes it impossible to see the pitch for most of the game.

On the other hand, I also know a very small number of people have been killed or hurt after being hit or burned or asphyxiated by flares at football matches, which is sad, although I’m sure that ‘flare fail’ represents a much smaller cause of football-related death or wounding than, say, ‘being run over by a bus on the way to the ground’, or ‘having a heart attack during a stressful period of play’, or ‘getting e. coli off a rat meat pasty at half-time’.

Nevertheless, the FA have warned this week that possession of a flare — lit or unlit — in a football ground is grounds for a fine, a football banning order and/or a jail sentence.

The FA have not yet banned buses, pasties or exciting passages of play but it can only be a matter of time. As far as I can see, if people want to light flares at the football, that’s fine. It’s football, it’s not a yoga class. If people want to throw flares during the football, however, then I am completely at ease with said people being hoiked off to the station, pushed down the stairs by the duty sergeant, and banned from coming to games for the rest of their lives.

It’s the same principle that I apply to bringing other items to football: coins, lighters, mobile phones, severed piglets’ heads, etc. Bring ‘em, enjoy ‘em, just don’t throw them about. Is that so hard to understand?

Ach, but of course it is. We live in a time when you can be ejected from a football ground for drinking in view of the pitch, smoking a fag, jumping on the turf to celebrate a victory, chanting offensive slogans at rival supporters, standing up, sitting in the wrong place or even wearing the ‘wrong’ brand of T-shirt to a big international tournament.

It is, in other words, the age of the purse-lipped ninny; and this week, the purse-lipped ninny hates flares.

So another bit of fun is BANNED. Do you hear that? BANNED. Isn’t it incredibly tiresome?

I swear something is missing from Fergie's book

Sir Alex Ferguson’s book is packed with tremendous anecdote, accusation and (largely justified) self-aggrandisement. One thing it almost entirely lacks, however, is curse words. Now, I’m not saying that I can’t get through 350 pages of footballing memoir without a bit of the old potty mouth, and I realise that this is supposed to be PG-rated entertainment, but I mean, come on. Twenty-six-and-a-half years of the hairdryer and there’s not a ‘f***’ or a ‘useless c***’ from Fergie (right) in sight? Pull the other one.

Get ready for one Kell of a weekend

Ruslan Provodnikov’s 10th-round TKO of Mike Alvarado in Denver was one of the most gripping and brutal fights of the year — a war in which Alvarado boxed with heart and technical skill while Provodnikov marched forward like a zombie, swinging and swinging and swinging until he had broken his opponent’s spirit. This weekend both Kell Brook and the 48-year-old world champion Bernard Hopkins are in action. This autumn’s run of great boxing matches gets better and better.

Jose is cranking up the naughties

GETTY

No longer the Special One? “I am the Happy One,” said Jose Mourinho when he landed back at Stamford Bridge in June, trying to convince us that he had, you know, changed. Ha! What a difference four months makes: it isn’t even Hallowe’en and already Jose has been sent to the stands and charged with improper conduct for yelling at match officials. Chelsea are beginning to crank through the gears and Mourinho is starting to crank up the naughties. Normal service has been resumed.

Roars of laughter over Lions quip

Much fun was had last week at the inaugural London Sports Writing Festival, in which Brian Moore and Matt Dawson discussed their fondest British & Irish Lions memories. The line of the night came during an affectionate discussion of the great Jason Leonard, a warrior but not a mastermind. “The thing about Jason is that he didn’t know the meaning of the word fear,” said Dawson. “To be fair, there are thousands of other words he doesn’t know the meaning of either,” shot back Moore. Wonderful.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in