Handball goes Crazy
An article surfaced recently which stated that rival fans at a handball match taking place in Greece recently went crazy and started a huge fight which slowly turned into a pitched battle. This battle then turned into a riot involving 500 fans who chucked chairs at rival fans, destroyed shops and caused some serious mayhem. The police were called in to try and quell the violence and ended up using tear gas on the fans. The most amazing fact about this story is that it happened at a handball match. One assumes that hooliganism of this kind rests solely in the realm of football but apparently not.
Greece has seen many incidents of sports related violence over the years. An article on the BBC website states that, “violence between sports fans in Greece is relatively common. All team sports were cancelled for two weeks in 2007 after a brawl between rival women's volleyball fans left one man dead,”
Sports related violence is common in many places in the world, many European countries experience violence regularly and the UK had its fair share of hooliganism in recent years but the situation has been getting better. The question here is; why is the situation of sports violence so bad in Greece and is there anything that can be done about it?
In 2005 a security conference was held in Greece which called upon police officials who had experience in dealing with hooliganism from the UK to help the police officials in Greece. The conference was seen as a success at the time and uncovered the root cause of the problem. “In Greece, co-operation between the clubs and the authorities is minimal. One club official says it isn't even clear who is responsible for cutting the grass, let alone security”. The article which this statement was taken from also stated that the UK had been effective in dealing with hooliganism by measures such as having a dedicated police team to track and deal with hooligans and improving football grounds. The British officials during this conference suggested to the Greek officials that they should establish these same measures if they wanted to rid themselves of hooliganism.
This conference took place in 2005 and by 2007 a fan had been killed during a women’s volleyball match and this recent fan riot just showed that not everything went according to plan. It could be that the suggestions were not implemented by the Greek officials or it could be that the problem is so deep rooted in the sports culture of the country that it will take many years to eradicate the problem for good. The issues of tribalism and group mentality that go along with hooliganism seem to be very strong in Greece and the government, police officials and the football stadium management will all have to work together to find a solution to this problem.
This problem has a bigger effect to sports in Greece overall. The problem is that the stadiums and sports clubs in the country are losing serious amounts of money because of this problem. The peaceful fans of the country stay away from the stadiums and watch the matches at home instead of coming to the stadium and having to deal with unruly fans. Since this problem has now penetrated a sport like handball and has also been experienced in volleyball matches, it seems like a good time for the government to step it up and put in place some policies that will help to stop hooliganism. Some steps like giving police special training or having a separate police force solely to police the stadiums on match days might make a difference. But the effort has to be genuine and concentrating solely on solving the problem because even after that conference in 2005, things got so out of hand during this handball match that people were throwing Molotov cocktails at each other and fighting with knives. This problem extends to security measures on the day of the match because how lapse can the security be during a tournament that someone can walk into a stadium with a knife or with a Molotov cocktail in tow. A simple metal detector would stop things like knives being brought in. Situations like these will have to be seriously improved and hopefully another incident like the one that took place at the handball match won’t occur again.
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