Tottenham Fans Attacked: Eyewitness Report #1

The following extract is taken from a Spurs supporter contributing to the message board at http://www.spursodyssey.com

I'm sure they'll be duly outraged that I've lifted the text, but I think it's important that as many people read this as possible... The sensitivities of a few are outweighed by need of the many to know the truth about Thursday night...


"I was sitting in the third row of the upper tier with my son, several of his friends (not kids all in the mid twenties or so) and quite a few other people fans that we knew.

We had a perfect view on what was going on below.

Let me say here that I did not see one Spurs or Seville fan in any sort of combat with each other before, during or after the match.

I did here on the plane home though that some fans arriving latish before kick off had some trouble by the entrance. Some fans got pushed by a police horse and a few fell trying to get away and were then hit by police batons.

Inside the ground what I saw was just tape separating the fans on the lower tier with no stewards or police in between. I could see no trouble here other than the normal banter and winding up by the fans then after the penalty for no reason that I could see the Spanish riot police came into that area and got between the two sets of fans they then tried to move the Spurs fans further away from the Seville fans. This they did in a heavy handed way by pushing them with their batons.

Then all of a sudden they started striking out at anyone in their way, there were Spurs fans there with their arms up trying to stop these animals called police but they just got more heavy handed with their batons.

I saw one guy trying to move away and he fell, as soon as this happened four of these bastards were whacking him whilst he was lying there defenseless.

Yes this did aggravate Spurs fans and some did try to hit the police and tore up and threw seats at them but you could see how angry they were at the indiscriminate way the police had gone in.

Some came into the upper tier too and started just hitting a few people near the exit of our tier fortunately for us up there it did not escalate too much but I must say I was fearful of what may happen on the way out.

I don't know who made the decision to remove the police from our areas after half time, maybe Spurs security had some input in this but once there were no police in there there was no more trouble.

Again whoever made the decision not to keep us in after the final whistle made an excellent decision because we just walked out and walked straight to our coaches although the atmosphere was very intimidating.

We were all very relieved to be on our coaches and able to phone families at home and tell them we were ok. I was so concerned that if we had been kept in for some time it would just be aggravated Spurs fans coming out and some could well start chanting at the police who would probably have just gone for the lot of us.

If there were any truly independent officials there on behalf of the authorities it would have been absolutely clear to them that the only people to blame for the trouble were the Spanish authorities and not Spurs fans. If the police had not acted as they did I believe not one person on either side would have been hurt."