Scally: Confessions of a Category C Football Hooligan by Andy Nicholls

Author:Andy Nicholls [Nicholls, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: violence, football hooligan, soccer, everton, hooliganism
Publisher: Milo Books Ltd
Published: 2011-05-16T22:00:00+00:00

12

THE BLUES IN EUROPE

(This chapter would be much longer had Liverpool fans not caused all English clubs to be banned from Europe. We were ready to rule the Continent in the mid-Eighties and now have to resort to trying to get in through the Intertoto Cup.)

IF ANY LIVERPOOL fans out there have bothered to buy this book, I bet you this week’s giro that you are now thinking, this will be a short chapter. Ho, Ho, Ho, Kopite wit at its best, now piss off and read Tommy Smith’s page in the Echo. Had I attended Everton games only in competitions abroad, they would indeed be correct and this section would be only a couple of pages deep. However, since 1979, when the Blues went on a pre-season tour of Antwerp, I and a good few others have had some of our best days at the match watching Everton warm up on foreign soil for another season of disappointment.

In all, I have seen The Blues play at fourteen different grounds abroad, ranging from the superb Feyenoord Stadium in Rotterdam to the less impressive Sportsplatz Moos in Balsthal, Switzerland. Collectively, events on every trip would fill a book alone, but many of the things we and the players did quite honestly cannot go into print, as I am sure several of us would be extradited and certain men who once were professional (?) footballers employed by Everton Football Club would no doubt send me a writ in a poor attempt to clear their names.

Apart from the pre-season tours, I have watched Everton play in two European Cup Winners Cup campaigns, in 1984/85 and 1995/96. In the 1984/85 season we went on to win the trophy days before Liverpool got us banned from Europe. During that season I went to every game apart from Inter Bratislava away. The club refused me a visa to travel to that game on the cheap official tour, three days before departure, making it impossible to get there off my own back. During the rest of the competition though, I had a ball. The police did not really know me and you could get away with virtually anything once you had waved goodbye to the white cliffs of Dover.

By the1995/96 season, when we finally won a cup at home and English clubs were allowed back into Europe, two things had changed: the team were crap and unlikely to progress very far in the competition, and I was by now a marked man. The two games I went to before Everton’s inevitable elimination were as enjoyable as itchy piles in the cinema.

Of all the pre-season tours I attended, I have covered only one in detail, the trip to Balsthal. The rest are told as one, as they were all seen through an alcoholic haze and, although the venues and countries were different, the outcome was always the same: drunken, thieving behaviour and a row with the Everton officials or players. The odd battle with the locals did happen but was rare, and not worthy of mention.

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