Euro 2016: England hooligans need self-policing to stop this embarrassment in France - but don't hold your breath

The scenes witnessed in Marseille and Lille is nothing less than juvenile delinquency with a beer-fuelled, nationalistic twist

England fans clashed with French police in Lille on Wednesday night (Getty)

You're generally slaughtered and described on social media as an agent of the British state when you extol the virtues of our football policing. But Wednesday night in Lille revealed the small-minded paranoia of those who sneer at the notion of British police 'spotters' working at games on the continent and like to say that they're only there on a jolly.

There was a crisis at around 9pm and the French riot police needed this strand of British crime-fighting experience. Bar and restaurant owners stopped selling alcohol earlier than had been expected and a small number of the English were not taking it too well. The French had sent for the water cannon.

In the police control room, British officers urged their counterparts to allow their spotters - officers experienced in how to negotiate with drunk and obnoxious football fans - to step in. The French agreed so the officers in question moved forward, coaxing and cajoling the English into leaving; cooling tempers. It is why the apocalyptic images of running battles between fans and riot police on British TV screens on Thursday morning did not include drenched fans and jets of water.

To say that the British policing role here is akin to schoolteachers coaxing socially acceptable behaviour out of truculent adolescents is no exaggeration, since what we are witnessing night after night - as English football's reputation is dragged through the mud - is nothing less than juvenile delinquency with a beer-fuelled, nationalistic twist.

The English "fans" who were chased around the streets of Lille last night were searching for any available excuse to back up their sense of victimhood. 'It was the French police.' Or: 'It was the Russians.' Or: 'It's the British media.' When in fact some of the prime perpetrators of this national embarrassment are the bare-bellied, finger-pointing drunken Englishmen, who like to think of themselves as an occupying force as they gather in their thousands and give France their songs about German bombers, Germans never winning a war, and - on Wednesday - tell the Russians to "f*** k off."

The 'spotters' could only do so much by the early hours of Thursday. They could not be in the midst of every mob, to stop those who let off flares in front of police officers, jabbed fingers in their faces, screamed: 'Come on! Come on!' and then complained bitterly about an over-zealous reaction. Senior British officers think the French riot police eventually lost patience. You reap what you sow in someone else's country. Their police. Their rules.

It is the presence of civilised nations which compound England's ignominy. The Swedes sang: 'Go home to your ugly wives' in Paris on Monday to the Irish, who had their own offering to give back. "You're sh*t. But your birds are fit." Not exactly socially enlightened, yet words delivered from both sides with the smiles of those who are happy - honoured - to be included in this festival and know the meaning of courtesy, maturity and respect on someone else's soil.

The hooligans who reaped a whirlwind in Lille have certainly contributed to handing Wales a subtle psychological advantage heading into the two nations' clash on Wednesday afternoon. The Welsh arrive in Lens in the midst of a journey of discovery, letting European football's rainbow nations know a little more about their beautiful country, its language and its people. The real English supporters arrive shaking their heads, wondering at the conduct of the minority who have made 'England' a dirty word.

There are no plans by the UK Football Policing Unit to draft in more 'spotters', whose role is actually to build and act on police intelligence about known criminals. A few dozen more can't materially change the conduct of the drunks. Neither is there more the Football Association can do. Its entreaties for civil behaviour, echoed publicly by Wayne Rooney, have been ignored. What England actually needs is the arrival of few harder, older individuals to populate these groups of juveniles and make them behave or find that there will be consequences. That would be self-policing by any other name but we won't be holding our breath.