Ken Early: Old Trafford fiasco shows soccer feels vulnerable

Yesterday evening, as the internet flooded with gloating Arsenal fans mocking Spurs for somehow contriving to finish third in a two-horse title race, one former pundit was frustrated that the football world didn’t seem to have its priorities straight.

"I may be wrong here but I'm not quite sure the enormity of what's happened at OT is registering," Gary Neville tweeted. "Lots still tweeting about meaningless games."

By that time it had been more than two hours since the match between Manchester United and Bournemouth had been abandoned, and half an hour since the security services had carried out a controlled explosion on the suspicious device that had been found in a toilet in the Sir Alex Ferguson stand.

It had not yet been confirmed that the device was not in fact a bomb, but merely what the Greater Manchester Police described as an “incredibly lifelike” hoax.

Yet even at that stage most people seemed ready to move on. Aside from the gloating over Tottenham, there were other absorbing football issues to discuss, such as whether Jose Mourinho will choose Manchester United or Everton.

Such football situations are rich with conversational potential. The shortage of hard information about the intentions of the key protagonists actually encourages speculation and discussion. The opposite was true of the shortage of information about the hoax bombing.

All people knew at that point is that it seemed somebody had left an imitation bomb at a stadium, with the intention of causing panic and chaos. The situation had been dealt with smoothly by the security services, so that the mass response fell short of panic, ending up somewhere between irritation and mild dismay.

That was before another police statement late last night caused everything to collapse into farce: “Following today’s controlled explosion, we have since found out that the item was a training device which had accidentally been left by a private company following a training exercise involving explosive search dogs.

“Whilst this item did not turn out to be a viable explosive, on appearance this device was as real as could be, and the decision to evacuate the stadium was the right thing to do, until we could be sure that people were not at risk.”

But while this ensured that the Toilet Bomb will be remembered as a comic rather than tragic episode, the fact remains that nobody was complaining that the authorities had over-reacted at the time. It no longer seems far-fetched that somebody would try to murder a large number of people at a football match.

Grim possibility

Maybe this is why people preferred to “tweet about meaningless games”, as Neville complained. Talking about the grim possibility of terrorist attacks becomes more uncomfortable the more plausible they seem. There was a time not long ago when the notion of somebody bombing a packed football stadium was the stuff of Tom Clancy airport paperbacks. Now, it’s a fear that will stalk the mind of everyone who attends a match at the European Championships in France.

Of course, there has been a major terrorist attack in a European Championship host city before. Yesterday’s match was called off 19 years and 11 months to the day after the IRA detonated a 3,300lb fertiliser bomb in Manchester city centre.

It seems curious now to think that the very next day, as emergency workers began to clear the rubble from the streets of Manchester’s shattered commercial district, Germany and Russia played out a Euros group match at Old Trafford. Were people that much tougher in 1996 that they could shrug off an attack on that scale and simply get on with the football?

The reason why they were able to continue with the tournament is not really that people were braver 20 years ago. It’s because they were dealing with a different kind of terrorism. The IRA bombing campaign conformed to a more conventional kind of logic. Their attacks on what they considered to be “legitimate” targets were characterised by a callous indifference to the risk that innocent people would be killed, but killing innocent people was never the aim in itself.

So the explosion in Manchester was preceded by telephone warnings that enabled the security services to evacuate the city centre. The biggest bomb ever exploded in Britain in peacetime would ultimately cause 212 injuries, mostly due to flying glass, but no fatalities. And nobody imagined that the people who blew up the Arndale Centre would turn their sights on Old Trafford.

This is not to indulge in some kind of misguided nostalgia for a bygone era when the terrorists played fair. It’s simply to acknowledge that a shift has occurred in recent years, where the targeting of terrorist attacks has become increasingly indiscriminate. Previous generations of terrorists tended to regard the slaughter of innocents as a propaganda setback. Their successors have come to see mass murder as an essential part of the spectacle.

When spectacle itself becomes the strategy, then it’s hard to imagine a more attractive target than a big sporting event, with tens of thousands of people present in the stadium and millions more watching live on TV. It is football’s very popularity that now makes it feel vulnerable.