http://www.hooligansandthugs.com/ Check the trailer on the right side. Crazy stuff! Among the Thugs is a great read along a similar topic.
if you do buy any similar books try to remember that most of these 'thugs' are about as likely to have been genuine hooligans as the average gangsta rapper has been a gangsta.
Alright, there are two sources saying it's OK. I'm going to guess they're OK, but I suppose it's safer to be cautious.
I picked this DVD up on Amazon. ( and cheaper) It's pretty good...loads and loads of fight scenes, with a cheesy techno score. Has footage of all the major hooligan disasters over the past couple decades.Its got EPL,Euro,World Cup, S.American league violence. Some of it's pretty disturbing, but boy do I love watching violent thug cops gettin beat down for some reason...The whole thing is like slowing down at a car accident, you know it's pretty f'ed up, but ya can't take your eyes off it. If ya have ever read Among The Thugs, it's kind of interestng to see footage of the scenes decribed in it. Turin, Sardinia, Copenhagen etc. Steve Jones is such a wanker, but that kind of adds to this DVD. Ya watch this and ya gotta sorta grin when ya see the tough guy, Euro poser wannabes in MLS supporters groups.....hey SJ ULTRAS, go watch this video, ha ha ha.
If by great read you mean "unsubstantiated and under-substantiated crap written by an upper-class anglophile twit from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who was mainly infatuated with the hooligan element because he was astonished to meet white people who actually scared him as opposed to the black population of the US he was more accustomed to being frightened by," then yes, Among the Thugs is a great read.
Re: Re: We should be happy this part of the game has not come ashore... Awesome! I gotta read this book now!
Re: Re: We should be happy this part of the game has not come ashore... It's kinda like Dr Dre puttin away the sequinned pants and jeri curl and making the dopest hardcore gangsta beats, forever changing hip hop and music (for better for worse can be argued)....real gangters don't sing about it, real hooligans aren't novelists, and Mario Pouzo wasn't a mob boss was he? DUH. Lighten up man, so the author isn't hard or street cred enough for ya...don't matter because the finished product is a pretty good book.
Re: Re: Re: We should be happy this part of the game has not come ashore... i think you missed the point. It wasn't a "he's not a hooligan so he has no right to write about it" complaint, more that he goes out of his way to seek out hooligans, then, despite the effort it took him to actually find anyone who met up to his idea of what a hooligan was, he then happily labels those extreme elements as typical. The same author could have easily spent his evenings talking to the roughest people in the roughest bars in town and come to the conclusion that going to bars is all about fighting.
Re: Re: Re: Re: We should be happy this part of the game has not come ashore... My day was brought in South-East London in the 30's during the depression. He says there were whole areas that the police wouldn't visit unless there were about 10 of them. There weren't just isolated incidents of violence in the streets - whole bus loads of blokes would come down from the east end and have stand-up fights with our lot and we would return the favour. A sort of 'away-day' with violence. Usually these people would be 'tooled up', i.e. broken bottles, chains, knives, etc. although no guns were used as it was thought cowardly. Just after the war my dad ran a firm which employed a chap called Johnny West who was a hard man for the Richardson's. He once chased 2 fellas round and round a wagon trying to cut their heads off with an axe. Mind you, he was executed in South Africa for murdering some enemy of the Richardsons so maybe he was a bit of a one off. At this time, however, football crowds used to clap when there was a fine piece of play and there was virtually no violence. Despite all the nonsense we hear from the media now about Britain's violent society the level of violence is actually a lot less than then. Violence at football matches went through a bad period in the seventies and early eighties but it was only ever a question of violence gravitating towards a particular venue rather than the venue being in some way linked to the violence. The football matches provided a handy meeting point for people who otherwise would have had to have put some effort into finding people to fight. The levels of violence, including gun crime, in America, is well known and yet there seems to be little violence at sporting venues but I can assure you that that is simply a happy coincidence for which you should be grateful. Violence is not a 'part of the game' as the title of this thread says - it is a part of some societies which can infect the game.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: We should be happy this part of the game has not come ashore... A friend of mine saw the stage version of Among the Thugs (which is actually not bad, since it doesn't pretend to be astute cultural commentary) and speculated that, had motorcycle gangs, say, been NFL fans in the 1960s, we would've had exactly this sort of problem. Luckily, they were into other things besides sports, like drugs, extortion, gun-running, etc., thereby allowing our sports media to put on an air of superiority whenever there's trouble at a stadium somewhere else on the planet.
So, why is Steve Jones narrating this thing? -Does he have some actual connection to football hooliganism, or has he just spent all the cash he made from those Sex Pistols reunion tours?
Is this the one where he's dressed up in a knight's costume? If so... it's a pretty lousy tape. BTW someone here said that the violence isn't actually linked to the game. Depends on how you look at it. There's plenty of hoolies who started their career walking into the stadium by daddy's hand on matchday who eventually ended up being a hooligan or something very close to a hooligan. Of course there's also people who really don't care about the football aspect. (young) males have always been somehow attracted to violence and always will be IMO. It's just that quite a few people feel it's necessary not to give in to these feelings because it hinders them in everyday life and they know that society does not accept violence (ahem...) Some people however hope to get away with what they do, others take the consequences like a man. And some really just don't give a damn.
You appear to be saying that hooligans come from only that small set of people who have fathers. Well obviously that narrows it down - to everyone on the face of the planet.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: We should be happy this part of the game has not come ashore... I saw it too. The first half is quite good... but almost everything after the intermission pretends to be astute political commentary.