by Ira Glass
Somehow the match started, was played, ended. And, while it could be said that there was no single serious incident, it could also be said that there was no moment without one. Several people were hurt, and one supporter was taken away to the hospital.
It was a peculiar setting for watching a sporting event, although, oddly, it didn’t seem so at the time. The day had consisted of such a strange succession of events that, by this point in the evening, it was the most natural thing in the world to be watching a football game surrounded by policemen: there was one on my left, another on my right, two directly behind me, and five in front. It didn’t bother me; it certainly didn’t bother the supporters, who, despite the distractions, were watching the match with complete attentiveness. And when Manchester United tied, the goal was witnessed, as it unfolded, by everyone there (except me; I was looking over my shoulder for missiles), and jubilation shot through them, their cheers and songs suddenly tinny and small in that great cavity of the Juventus football ground, its seventy thousand Italians now comprehensively silent. The United supporters jumped up and down, fell over each other, embraced.
But the euphoria was brief. In the final two minutes Juventus scored again. The exhilaration felt but minutes before by that small band of United supporters was now felt—magnified many times—by the seventy thousand Italian fans who, previously humiliated, directed their powerful glee into our corner. The roar was deafening, invading the senses like a bomb.
And with that explosive roar, the mood changed.
What happened next is confusing to recall. Everything started moving at great speed. Everything would continue to move at great speed for many hours. I remember that riot police started kicking one of the supporters who had fallen down. I remember hearing that Sammy had arrived and then coming upon him. He was big, well-dressed, with heavy horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like a physics student, standing underneath the bleachers, his back to the match, an expensive leather bag and camera hanging over his shoulder, having (like Robert) just come from France by taxi.
And I remember some screaming: there had been a stabbing (I didn’t see it) and, with the screaming, everyone bolted—animal speed, instinct speed—and pushed past the police and rushed for the exit. But the gate into the tunnel was locked, and the United supporters slammed into it.
It was impossible to get out.
Throughout this last period of the match, I had been hearing a new phrase: “It’s going to go off.”
It’s going to go off, someone said, and his eyes were glassy, as though he had taken a drug.
If this keeps up, I heard another say, then it’s going to go off. And the phrase recurred—it’s going to go off, it’s going to go off—spoken softly, but each time it was repeated it gained authority.
Everyone was pressed against the locked gate, and the police arrived moments later. The police pulled and pushed in one direction, and the supporters pushed in another, wanting to get out. It was shove and counter shove. It was crushing, uncomfortable. The supporters were humorless and determined.
It’s going to go off.
People were whispering.
I heard: “Watch out for knives. Zip up your coat.”
I heard: “Fill up your pockets.”
I heard: “It’s going to go off. Stay together. It’s going to go off.”
I was growing nervous and slipped my notebook into my shirt, up against my chest, and buttoned up my jacket. A chant had started: “United. United. United.” The chant was clipped and sure. “United. United. United.” The word was repeated, United, and, through the repetition, its meaning started changing, pertaining less to a sporting event or a football club and sounding instead like a chant of unity—something political. It had become the chant of a mob.
“United. United. United. United. United. United . . .”
And then it stopped.
There was a terrible screaming, a loud screaming, loud enough to have risen above the chant. The sound was out of place; it was a woman’s screaming.
Someone said that it was the mother of the stabbed boy.
The screaming went on. It appeared that a woman had been caught by the rush to get away and swept along by it. I spotted her: she was hemmed in and thrashing about, trying to find some space, some air. She couldn’t move towards the exit and couldn’t move away from it, and she wasn’t going to be able to: the crush was too great, and it wouldn’t stay still, surging back and forth by its own volition, beyond the control of anyone in it. She was very frightened. Her scream, piercing and high-pitched, wouldn’t stop. She started hyperventilating, taking in giant gulps of air, and her screams undulated with the relentless rhythm of her over-breathing. It was as if she were drowning in her own high-pitched oxygen, swinging her head from side to side, her eyes wild. I thought: Why hasn’t she passed out? I was waiting for her to lose consciousness, for her muscles to give up, but she didn’t pass out. The scream went on. Nobody around me was saying a word. I could tell that they were thinking what I was thinking, that she was going to have a fit, that she was going to die, there, now, pressed up against them. It went on, desperate and unintelligible and urgent.
And then someone had the sense to lift her up and raise her above his shoulders—it was so obvious—and he passed her to the person in front of him. And he passed her to the person in front of him. And in this way, she was passed, hand to hand, above everyone’s heads, still screaming, still flailing, slowly making her way to the exit, and then, once there, the gate was opened to let her out.
And it was all that was needed. Once the gate had been opened, the English supporters surged forwards, pushing her heavily to one side.
I was familiar with the practice of keeping visiting supporters locked inside at the end of a match until everyone had left and of using long lines of police, with horses and dogs, to direct the visitors to their buses. The plan in Turin had been the same, and the police were there, outside the gate, in full riot regalia, waiting for the United supporters. But they weren’t ready for what came charging out of the tunnel.
For a start, owing to the trapped woman, the supporters came out earlier than expected and when they emerged, they came out very fast, with police trailing behind, trying to keep up. They came as a mob, with everyone pressed together, hands on the shoulders of the person in front, moving quickly, almost at a sprint, racing down the line of police, helmets and shields and truncheons a peripheral blur. The line of police led to the buses, but just before the bus door someone in the front veered sharply and the mob followed. The police had anticipated this and were waiting. The group turned again, veering in another direction, and rushed out into the space between two of the buses. It came to a sudden stop, and I slammed into the person in front of me, and people slammed into me from behind: the police had been there as well. Everyone turned around. I don’t know who was in front—I was trying only to keep up—and nothing was being said. There were about two hundred people crushed together, but they seemed able to move in unison, like some giant, strangely coordinated insect. A third direction was tried. The police were not there. I looked behind: the police were not there. I looked to the left and the right: there were no police anywhere.
What was the duration of what followed? It might have been twenty minutes; it seemed longer. It was windy and dark, and the trees, blowing back and forth in front of the street lamps, cast long, moving shadows. I was never able to see clearly.
I knew to follow Sammy. The moment the group broke free, he had handed his bag and camera to someone, telling him to give them back later at the hotel. Sammy then turned and started running backwards. He appeared to be measuring the group, taking in its size.
The energy, he said, still running backwards, speaking to no one in particular, the energy is very high. He was alert, vital, moving constantly, looking in all directions. He was holding out his hands, with his fingers outstretched.
Feel the energy, he said.
There were six or seven younger supporters
jogging beside him, and it would be some time before I realized that there were always six or seven younger supporters jogging beside him. When he turned in one direction, they turned with him. When he ran backwards, they ran backwards. No doubt if Sammy had suddenly become airborne there would have been the sight of six or seven younger supporters desperately flapping their arms trying to do the same. The younger supporters were in fact very young. At first I put their age at around sixteen, but they might have been younger. They might have been fourteen. They might have been nine: I take pleasure, even now, in thinking of them as nothing more than overgrown nine-year-olds. They were nasty little nine-year-olds who, in some kind of prepubescent confusion, regarded Sammy as their dad.
Sammy had stopped running backwards and had developed a kind of walk-run, which involved moving as quickly as possible without breaking into an outright sprint. Everybody else did the same. The idea, it seemed, was to be inconspicuous—not to be seen to be actually running, thus attracting the attention of the police—but nevertheless to jet along as fast as you could. The effect was ridiculous: two hundred English supporters, tattooed torsos tilted slightly forwards, arms straight, hurtling stiffly down the sidewalk, believing that nobody was noticing them.
Everyone crossed the street, decisively, without a word spoken. A chant broke out—“United, United, United”—and Sammy waved his hands up and down, as if trying to bat down the flames of a fire, urging people to be quiet. A little later there was another one-word chant. This time it was “England.” They couldn’t help themselves. They wanted so badly to act like normal football supporters—they wanted to sing and behave drunkenly and carry on doing the same rude things that they had been doing all day long—and they had to be reminded that they couldn’t. Why this pretense of being invisible? There was Sammy again, whispering, insistent: no singing, no singing, waving his hands up and down. The nine-year-olds made a shushing sound to enforce the message.
Sammy said to cross the street again—he had seen something—and his greasy little companions went off in different directions, fanning out, as if to hold the group in place, and then returned to their positions beside him. It was only then that I appreciated fully what I was witnessing: Sammy had taken charge of the group—moment by moment giving it specific instructions—and was using his obsequious little lads to ensure that his commands were being carried out.
I remembered, on my first night with Mick, hearing that leaders had their little lieutenants and sergeants. I had heard this and I had noted it, but I hadn’t thought much of it. It sounded too much like toyland, like a war game played by schoolboys. But here, now, I could see that everything Sammy said was being enforced by his entourage of little supporters. The nine-year-olds made sure that no one ran, that no one sang, that no one strayed far from the group, that everyone stayed together. At one moment, a cluster of police came rushing towards us, and Sammy, having spotted them, whispered a new command, hissing that we were to disperse, and the members of the group split up—some crossing the street, some carrying on down the center of it, some falling behind—until they had got past the policemen, whereupon Sammy turned around, running backwards again, and ordered everyone to regroup: and the little ones, like trained dogs, herded the members of the group back together.
I trotted along. Everyone was moving at such a speed that, to ensure I didn’t miss anything, I concentrated on keeping up with Sammy. I could see that this was starting to irritate him. He kept having to notice me.
What are you doing here? he asked me, after he had turned around again, running backwards, doing a quick head count after everyone had regrouped.
He knew precisely what I was doing there, and he had made a point of asking his question loudly enough that the others had to hear it as well.
Just the thing, I thought.
Fuck off, one of his runts said suddenly, peering into my face. He had a knife.
“Didja hear what he said, mate? He said fuck off. What the fuck are you doing here anyway, eh? Fuck off.”
It was not the time or the occasion to explain why I was there, and, having got this far, I wasn’t about to turn around now.
I dropped back a bit, just outside of striking range. I looked about me. I didn’t recognize anyone. I was surrounded by people I hadn’t met; worse, I was surrounded by people I hadn’t met who kept telling me to fuck off. I felt I had understood the drunkenness I had seen earlier in the day. But this was different. If anyone here was drunk, he was not acting as if he was. Everyone was purposeful and precise, and there was a strong quality of aggression about them, like some kind of animal scent. Nobody was saying a word. There was a muted grunting and the sound of their feet on the pavement; every now and then, Sammy would whisper one of his commands.
I had no idea where we were, but, thinking about it now, I see that Sammy must have been leading his group around the stadium, hoping to find Italian supporters along the way. When he turned to run backwards, he must have been watching the effect his group of two hundred walk-running Frankensteins was having on the Italian lads, who spotted the English rushing by and started following them, curious, attracted by the prospect of a fight or simply by the charisma of the group itself, unable to resist tagging along to see what might happen.
And then Sammy, having judged the moment to be right, suddenly stopped, and, abandoning all pretense of invisibility, shouted: “Stop.”
Everyone stopped.
“Turn.”
Everyone turned. They knew what to expect. I didn’t. It was only then that I saw the Italians who had been following us. In the half-light, streetlight darkness I couldn’t tell how many there were, but there were enough for me to realize—holy shit!—that I was now unexpectedly in the middle of a very big fight: having dropped back to get out of the reach of Sammy and his lieutenants I was in the rear, which, as the group turned, had suddenly become the front.
Adrenaline is one of the body’s more powerful chemicals. Seeing the English on one side of me and the Italians on the other, I remember seeming quickly to take on the properties of a small helicopter, rising several feet in the air and moving out of everybody’s way. There was a roar, everybody roaring, and the English supporters charged into the Italians.
In the next second I went down. A dark blur and then smack: I got hit on the side of the head by a beer can—a full one—thrown powerfully enough to knock me over. As I got up, two policemen, the only two I saw, came rushing past, and one of them clubbed me on the back of the head. Back down I went. I got up again, and most of the Italians had already run off, scattering in all directions. But many had been tripped up before they got away.
Directly in front of me—so close I could almost reach out to touch his face—a young Italian, a boy really, had been knocked down. As he was getting up, an English supporter pushed the boy down again, ramming his flat hand against the boy’s face. He fell back and his head hit the pavement, the back of it bouncing slightly.
Two other Manchester United supporters appeared. One kicked the boy in the ribs. It was a soft sound, which surprised me. You could hear the impact of the shoe on the fabric of the boy’s clothing. He was kicked again—this time very hard—and the sound was still soft, muted. The boy reached down to protect himself, to guard his ribs, and the other English supporter then kicked him in the face. This was a soft sound as well, but it was different: you could tell that it was his face that had been kicked and not his body and not something protected by clothing. It sounded gritty. The boy tried to get up and he was pushed back down—sloppily, without much force. Another Manchester United supporter appeared and another and then a third. There were now six, and they all started kicking the boy on the ground. The boy covered his face. I was surprised that I could tell, from the sound, when someone’s shoe missed or when it struck the fingers and not the forehead or the nose.
I was transfixed. I suppose, thinking about this incident now, I was close enough to have stopped the kicking. Everyone there was off-balance—with
one leg swinging back and forth—and it wouldn’t have taken much to have saved the boy. But I didn’t. I don’t think the thought occurred to me. It was as if time had dramatically slowed down, and each second had a distinct beginning and end, like a sequence of images on a roll of film, and I was mesmerized by each image I saw. Two more Manchester United supporters appeared—there must have been eight by now. It was getting crowded and difficult to get at the boy: they were bumping into each other, tussling slightly. It was hard for me to get a clear view or to say where exactly the boy was now being kicked, but it looked like there were three people kicking him in the head, and the others were kicking him in the body—mainly the ribs but I couldn’t be sure. I am astonished by the detail I can recall. For instance, there was no speech, only that soft, yielding sound—although sometimes it was a gravelly, scraping one—of the blows, one after another. The moments between the kicks seemed to increase in duration, to stretch elastically, as each person’s leg was retracted and then released for another blow.
The thought of it: eight people kicking the boy at once. At what point is the job completed?
It went on.
The boy continued to try to cushion the blows, moving his hands around to cover the spot were he had just been struck, but he was being hit in too many places to be able to protect himself. His face was now covered with blood, which came from his nose and his mouth, and his hair was matted and wet. Blood was all over his clothing. The kicking went on. On and on and on, that terrible soft sound, with the boy saying nothing, only wriggling on the ground.
A policeman appeared, but only one. Where were the other police? There had been so many before. The policeman came running hard and knocked over two of the supporters, and the others fled, and then time accelerated, no longer slow motion time, but time moving very fast.
We ran off. I don’t know what happened to the boy. I then noticed that all around me there were others like him, others who had been tripped up and had their faces kicked.
