Casuals: The Story of a Terrace Cult by Thornton Phil

Author:Thornton, Phil [Thornton, Phil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: scallies, casuals, football hooligans, terrace fashion, dressers, hooliganism
Publisher: Milo Books Ltd
Published: 2011-05-18T22:00:00+00:00

Peter Hooton: We were supposed to be going to Ostia, which is the playground for Rome’s rich and famous. We went on Mono Tours: Mono, one of our mates, had chartered a flight from some dodgy travel agent in town and booked us in the hotel, but we ended up in a place called Ladispoli, which ended up years later as a place for Yugoslavian refugees. Basically it was a run-down seaside resort, the Italian version of Talacre [a notorious North Wales resort favoured by Liverpudlians]. Ostia is only about twenty minutes from Rome but Ladispoli was an hour and a half on the coach. We got there on the Saturday before the match – there was a coachload of us, Halewood, Kirkby, The Holt from Kensington, some of the Huyton Baddies – and within 20 minutes of going out for a drink, the whole town had turned out for us.

We thought the one thing that’d wind them up would be to chant ‘Juve’, so we started singing it and all these scooters started pulling up. About 30 of us tried to walk back to the main square and were attacked from all sides. I don’t think they’d seen visiting football fans before, it was like the aliens had landed. We got back to the square and barricaded ourselves in this bar, only one way in and one way out. A big mob gathered outside, not just the scooter boys, there were girls there and priests.

One feller called Angelo was the plain clothes community policeman and he was like Pat O’Brien in Angels With Dirty Faces, that kind of character, and he went out to try and calm the crowd down. Unfortunately we had a few loonies with us, and when he was making his address to the common people, these went out and started butting people. In the end Angelo pulled a gun out. He thought it would be best if he invited us all for Sunday lunch and have a game of football with the locals after, which we did and between Sunday and Wednesday it was great.

The game in Rome on the Wednesday, I’d never experienced anything like it. They thought they’d already won the European Cup, in fact there was bunting around the streets, ‘Campioni’, the Italian for champions, which is where the chant comes from. As far as they were concerned, we were sacrificial lambs. All throughout the game we were getting bottles of piss thrown at us and as soon as final whistle went and we won on penalties, they started burning Roma flags all round the ground, they were so disgusted. I’d never seen anything like it; it was like Dante’s inferno.

Our coach was parked right next to their end, next to the River Tiber by the bridge where all the away fans always got stabbed. We knew what to expect; everyone was going, ‘Roma are like the Millwall or West Ham of Italy.’ Before the match, we didn’t think much about it but after, you thought, Shit, we’ve got to get to that bridge.

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