My (not-so)quiet Sunday afternoon

I thought it was destined to be a normal Sunday of nothing doing except for carving my silhouette into my mattress. Well the destiny was about to prove me wrong. I decided to spend my afternoon watching non-stop the two whole hours of a zombie movie. My bladder disagreed. So obeying mother nature’s command I went to relieve myself but on my way to the facilities I was intercepted by my roommate’s gracious invitation to the local football derby: FCZ against Grasshoppers.

Since these are most likely the last good-weathered days of the year I decided to join them in their Sunday afternoon Bread and Circus activities. There I was the whole first half comfortably sitting, enjoying an absolutely boring football match while recuperating from a whole-weekend-lasting migraine. But my friend’s companion decided that her first live-football match needed a little boost. And so we decided—they decided, I followed—to mingle into the yelling mob of Zurich supporters Die Südkurve. At least she got what she asked for.

There was a penalty against our team. Goal. 2-1, we’re losing. As the supporters of our overcrowded firm started to feel the weight of the scoring I started to feel on my back a much physical weight, someone was pushing me. We were tight close to each other, right? Then I thought, “this girl wants to go through… or something more?“ well I know she was a girl because she wasn’t making any effort not to push my back with her breasts. “That’s new,” I thought. Thinking that she herself was being pushed I started turning to assess the situation when suddenly her whole body mass lunged forward. She was losing consciousness. I tried to stop her but only helped to slow her inevitable fall.

Among the crowd we managed to lift her off the ground not unlike a potato sack. Then we carried her to the upper grounds calling for medical help. We rolled her to her side, managed to open her mouth, testify that her breathing had resumed and we could even hear some mumbling. During this commotion we used our team scarves to fancy a pillow. But the match must go on, right? When we had nothing more to do we collected our scarves and returned to the match. Well it turns out that our scarves got mixed in the commotion and now I have a much older, much dirtier scarf. Nonetheless, my “new” scarf has a signature of the number 30 and proudly wears an interesting story. (I am aware that this scarf may have some emotional value attached to it so if you’re the owner of the referred scarf and you are reading this, don’t hesitate, contact me and we will arrange an exchange of scarves).

This amount of happenings would suffice for a normal post, but my Sunday was not yet over and there are still some things to come. Having survived the commotion we decided to regain our spots. Not five minutes had elapsed when to our right (East tribune, that is to the right of the South-curve, duh) three masked pseudo-fans starting running towards the rival supporter’s firm. The imbeciles threw a gigantic firecracker to the other spectators. Within seconds the three lonely morons incited the rest of poor-witted blood-lusty hooligans, rapidly escalating into rioting.

I don’t know who was in charge of security, if it was the police of canton Zurich or a private company, or a mixture of both; what I do know is that they were completely incompetent. They could have easily foreseen and maybe even prevent the rioting after the first attacks. During the first half someone had already thrown a first firecracker without consequences, so they knew the firms were in possession of this kind of artefacts.

This behaviour must be punished. It’s not fair for such a fantastic sport that a couple of violence-sickened misfits ruin the pleasant afternoon of thousands. In my opinion then, what can be done to prevent these behaviours? Well definitely a shared responsibility, the city must implement stricter entry controls and reinforce the boundaries between zones. But the clubs must also share the responsibility. They have to let they firms know that this kind of barbaric behaviour shall not be tolerated. And in order to do so, first a penalty to the clubs has to be implemented, exactly were it hurts the most: their wallets. If the clubs themselves get an economic penalty I can be sure that the prevention of such antisocial behaviours would be in the clubs’ best interests rather than only transfer the responsibility to the police corps, as they are currently doing.

It is now time for the representatives of the Swiss Football League to decide. I’m no judge myself and they have much more information than I do. But I do believe these problems are not solved on one-side-only responsibility framework. At the moment is not completely clear who culprits are, but for me it is really clear who the victims are: the real football fans and football itself.

Epilogue.

If someone has information on that girl, I’d be grateful for any peace of news. Before the definite interruption of the match we returned to check if she was all right, but the ambulance had already taken her. Good luck, my dear fainting lady; you didn’t miss much, just a bunch of idiots disrupting our Sunday.