Euro 2016: Why Greg Dyke's indignation at Uefa is wholly justified

The Football Association chairman has expressed his 'serious concerns' to Euro 2016 organisers after they threatened England with expulsion

England fans were charged by Russian supporters at the Stade Vélodrome (Getty)

You only had to drift around a few bars in northern Paris on Monday to see the chaotic and deeply inadequate organisation of the European Championships. The French interior minister had just declared in the nation’s morning newspapers that an alcohol ban would be imposed within vicinity of all the tournament’s games. Cold pints of lager were being freely and calmly served up for the supporters of the Republic of Ireland and Sweden.

There was no problem. Both sets of supporters were demonstrating a faculty for conducting themselves with dignity and modesty in someone else’s country. But this is the way Uefa's flagship event is being run: rules made up on-the-hoof to meet a problem for which no-one made any contingency, because no-one thought to ask intelligence officers about the size and the shape of football-related violence. British police know that there has been a problem in eastern Europe for at least five years.

In Marseilles on Saturday night, tooled-up Russian thugs carried out acts of chilling, calculated violence and hours later that same nation’s supporters were allowed to smuggle flares with impunity into a stadium where there was not the slightest segregation to protect England fans from them. The English were literally chased from the stadium, falling over each other as they ran, in fear of their lives.

And yet, in their infinite wisdom, Uefa despatched a letter to the FA within 12 hours which neither acknowledged that Russians were instigators of the violence, nor distinguished between them and the English. The “so-called supporters” of the two countries - as the organisation glibly put it - appeared to be one and the same, and the FA were warned that expulsion would follow if their house was not put in order.

The conduct of some English fans has certainly left plenty to be desired in the past week. Those who arrived in Marseille to sing about ’50 German bombers’ and declare, as they did were on Saturday, that “We are England, this city is ours”, have frankly been an embarrassment. They had telegraphed where they were when French and Russian hooligans came calling.

England supporters were forced to flee the stadium after Russian fans charged (AP)

Yet that Uefa correspondence was breath-taking in its remove from the realities of events. It revealed Uefa for what it is: an organisation bathing in the commercial razzmatazz of its a showpiece tournament, and yet so institutionally complacent that it has simply not been equipped to deal with the realities of keeping supporters safe, at ground level. In another statement on Sunday it said that there were “segregation issues at Stade Velodrome” and would “implement corrective measures.” The glossing over of a catastrophic failure was beyond belief.

This is the same so-called governing body so blithely unaware of football's world that a match which British police warned The Independent last December was a security concern was staged on the Mediterranean coast at 9pm on a Saturday evening in the middle of Ramadan. Neither British nor French police had any way of influencing this. Uefa made clear that the time and the place were fixed from the moment the tournament draw was made.

All of which is why the indignant and trenchant tone of FA chairman Greg Dyke today in response to Uefa's letter is entirely appropriate. To imply that both sets of these supporters were responsible for the charge at the end of Saturday’s fixture is idiocy; to have England somehow facing the same threat of expulsion as Russia nothing less than folly.

The best measure of this arrived in the respective responses of the two nations to Saturday's events, yesterday. From England, came an acknowledgement that, though not the propagators of violence, the wild fringe of its supporter base cannot arrive in foreign countries and act like an occupying force. Captain Wayne Rooney was put forward to urge courtesy and respect. From Russia, we were treated to Igor Lebedev - a Russian FA executive – telling a journalist that 90 per cent of fans go to football to fight, with the implication being that it is acceptable to do so. Such are the individuals that England find themselves equated with, by a governing body which strides from one disaster to another.