Who is going to win the Euro 2016? England or Russia?
Ooops … sorry I got it wrong. You thought I was talking about the sideshow featuring some football games between the top sides in Europe.
Don’t be silly. I’m talking about the main event; English hooligans versus Russian hooligans. That’s where the real contest is.
I think the TV networks agree with me as whenever I switch on the box I see shirtless weightlifters armed with steel bars chasing either equally shirtless skinny, pimply-faced youths or middle-aged guys with beer bellies.
To be fair, the actual football games do get a mention every now and again just to ease the monotony of flailing fists or flying chairs.
Indeed, I even know the score between Russia and England (1-1), although it was more interesting watching the Russian Minister of Sport Vitaly Mutko punching the air when his thugs invaded the English section of the stadium after the match in Marseille.
I hardly know the results of the other games.
However, judging by TV footage, these street fights are no contest.
Russia is winning hands down, but that’s not surprising considering, by their own admission, most of their hooligans are ripped martial arts experts who cut their teeth doing real fighting in the Ukraine invasion, and before that, nailing Muslims in Chechnya.
Compare that to an English hooligan who does most of his training in the pub with a pain threshold measured by how many tattoos he can withstand.
So bottom line … if you were a gambler, would you put your money on a bunch of highly-organized militias on steroids, many giving Nazi salutes, or a motley mob who could barely organise an all-fall-down in a brewery?
Russians revel in bad behaviour
However, even with Russian superiority in organisation and muscle, the poor English fans have another problem; the French police seem to hate them even more than the Russians do.
Consequently, the tally is not only more English supporters in hospital, but even more in jail, while not one Russian has even been arrested (yet).
The French have deported some Slavic bruisers, but apparently not the main ones.
As always, the most interesting thing about this debacle that is debilitating football faster than an Ebola virus is the readers’ comments in the English newspapers.
Overwhelmingly, most seem to think it’s about time English hooligans got a thumping as that may stop the rot.
Hardnuts in English football seen running like rabbits will, at the very least, make them a laughing-stock back home.
Then there is another school of thought that believe English fans have shamed the nation, not because they’re thugs, but by being beaten at the own game – the street brawls.
And finally, you get the thugs themselves claiming that in the ‘good old days’ the Russians would have got hammered.
Hard-core Pom hooligans, who would have been at the forefront of the fights in France, have instead been banned from all tournaments for life.
But flippancy aside, the sad truth is that while most of England deplores the behaviour of their football fans, Russia is revelling in it.
French police blamed
One of the leaders of the Russian thugs, a self-professed neo-Nazi called Alexander Shprygin who has been pictured giving a Hitler salute, is actually traveling with the Russian Football Union.
Even worse, RFU executive committee member Igor Lebedev tweeted after Russian fans were videoed kicking a semi-comatose English supporter repeatedly in the head, ‘Well done lads’.
Then Vladimir Markin, a senior Russian police official, said this was all the French police’s fault.
They were unable to control the ‘normal’ behaviour of Russian fans because they are more used to policing ‘gay pride parades’, he mocked.
England can’t come out of this any worse as their football louts have no reputation to defend in any event.
Calling the yobs ‘girls who can’t fight’ as the Russians are doing may hurt their feelings, but no one else’s.
However, Russia has everything to lose. The key issue here is that Moscow is hosting the Euro 2018.
Thanks to the response to their own steroid-fuelled thugs, that tournament will probably be dead in the water.
