Hooligans to be banned from World Cup

So 3,000 of the hardcore nutters who might be expected to ruin this year’s World Cup are to have their passports taken away and told not to be naughty for a month. Is this a realistic solution? They are presumably free to cause mayhem here instead. I’d prefer to have this lot as far away from the UK as possible. Surely someone could open up the old Soviet gulags on the Kamchatka Peninsula and pack these mutants off for a few weeks? Sadly that’s not what our press said. Read on for more.

Newcastle’s Evening Chronicle has some handy facts and figures about the local loons who need watching. The reader comment below the article is absolutely spot on.

The Liverpool Echo relates the details about this policy move and has some interesting quotes from a Home Office spokesperson.

Have some fun by running this sentence through your head in a comedy Brummie accent: “You’ve misbehaved, now you’re going to miss the World Cup.” Thanks, Birmingham Mail. 308 locals can expect control orders in due course, the paper says.

There are 31 people in the York and North Yorkshire area who can’t watch matches here or abroad, according to the York Press.

The story in Wales Online looks remarkably similar to the Liverpool Echo version. You can’t hide a cut and paste job just by adding a picture of an England fan with blood oozing from a wound on his arm.

Hmmmmm, I think a pattern is developing. This Yorkshire Post article is, well, pretty much the same as the Welsh and Scouse versions. I need some local angle, perhaps a fan seen trying to arrange a passport and tickets to Cape Town for his Japanese fighting dog, or it gets a bit dull after a while.

Perhaps the London Evening Standard has a story about one of these deranged mutants and will tell all. Nope.

Jeeez, nearly half the fans who took part in this poll want the World Cup moved from South Africa. That’s a worrying level of pessimism but perhaps not too surprising as the poll was taken after the attack on the Togo team bus.

The latest in the Best World Cup Player Of The Decade series follows this post.