Hawthorns football trouble the latest example of a sad trend that goes back centuries

They were revisited at the Hawthorns, a sickening Sunday that gave the game in the Black Country a bloody nose.

Yet crowd trouble and football have stomped hand in hand since someone decided good sport could be spawned from an inflated pig’s bladder.

Hooliganism is a very old disease. It is not a solely English disease. Where fans gathered, disorder frequently followed – even in the historic town of Shrewsbury.

An observer of one 1899 fixture observed: “There were many thousands at Shrewsbury on Easter Monday, and the concomitants of betting, drinking and bad language were fearful to contemplate, while the shouting and horseplay on the highways were a terror to peaceful residents passing homewards.”

Back in 1314, Edward II was the first to tackle it. Back then, football was a nasty melee of rival villages attempting to kick or carry a spherical object from one side of heathland to the other. It was akin to today’s Atherstone ball game with bad attitudes and plenty of blood.

Such was the crowd trouble ignited by matches that soon descended into inter-parish punch-ups, the king banned them. Edward was also concerned the new craze was interfering with obligatory archery practice.

He initially gave football the red card in London after merchants complained: “There is a great noise in the city caused by hustling over large balls from which many evils may arise which God forbid.”

A little flowery, perhaps, but the message holds true today.

General sporting riots have an even longer history. In Constantinople in 532AD rival chariot race supporters battled for a week, burning down a significant portion of the city and killing thousands.

Mass, violent soccer insurrection was nameless until the 1890s, when the exploits of a notorious Irish family, the O’Hooligans, gained national attention through a popular music hall song.

Those incendiary words first made it into print in 1894, a court report referring to a gang of Lambeth villains as both the O’Hooligan Boys and Hooligan Boys.

Four years later, the Daily Graphic newspaper denounced the gang’s reign of terror: “The avalanche of brutality which, under the name of Hooliganism, has cast such a vile slur on the social records of south London.”

First there was the word and the word soon became flesh. Writers of the day liked it and claimed it. Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G Wells both used it and in 1900 comic strip illustrator Frederick Burr Opper unveiled a new character, Happy Hooligan.

Sport’s social disease had a title, endorsed by some of our greatest literary stars.

Trouble at football matches didn’t make headlines until 1885 and the very first newspaper report of a mass brawl involved Aston Villa.

The scenes after Preston North End trounced the Birmingham side 5-0 in a “friendly” made the Hawthorns incident appear a mere tiff.

Both teams were pelted with stones, spat at, beaten with sticks, kicked and punched. One Preston player was left unconscious by what the press described as “howling roughs”.

It was a sea mile away from the popular image of jolly fans sporting large rosettes and clutching rattles.

Preston’s howling roughs notched-up anther unwanted first a year later. They featured in the first case of football violence outside a ground – a mass railway station brawl with Queens Park fans.

In 1909, an Old Firm Glasgow derby between Celtic and Rangers ended in 6,000 spectators swapping blows. Fifty police officers were seriously injured and “every street lamp in Hampden smashed”.

In the beginning there was the word, hooliganism. And in the 1970s those who carried the torch for early 20th century cloth-capped rowdies became more organised. They plotted matchday violence like generals planning a campaign.

They liaised with rival gangs over potential battle sites.

In the 70s there was a new word, “firms” – hardcore mobs with names, hierarchies and even calling cards.

And the West Midlands had some of the most violent firms in the four divisions. A club’s size or success had no bearing on a firm’s destructive power. Some small clubs were cursed by the most savage so-called supporters.

The English Border Front was linked with Shrewsbury and was once rated by American sports site Bleacher Report as the second most feared firm in Britain.

Walsall’s Junction 9 had a 70s appetite for destruction and Hereford’s Inner City Firm ranked in the premiership of troublemakers.

West Brom have suffered a swathe of firms, although Section 5 – named after a piece of legislation used to clamp down on terrace yobs – remain the most notorious.

In his book Sons of Albion, Tony Freeth wrote: “West Brom’s firm was one of the first in the country to be multi-racial, with whites, Afro-Caribbeans and Asians all fighting side-by-side.”

Section 5 infamously clashed with Wolves fans in Amsterdam prior to a 2002 England international. Over 50 people fought on the city’s streets.

In a 2011 game between the sides, trouble erupted when a smoke bomb was thrown.

Wolves were cursed by the Subway Army, its splinter group the Bridge Boys and later the Yamyam Army. The first name is a nod to the gangs’ many ambush attacks on away fans as they entered a subway leading to Molineux.

The firms are driven by social deprivation, Desmond Morris argued in his 1981 book The Soccer Tribe.

He wrote: “Sociologists studying the background of offenders have found that, time and again, it is the young men from the more deprived areas of the city or the town, living out their daily lives in crowded slums, or boring, soulless housing estates, who are the typical offenders.

“Their outbursts of violence have little to do with the Soccer Tribe itself, which merely acts as a dramatic stage on which they can perform. Since society has given them little chance to express their manhood in a positive or creative manner, they take the only course of action left to them apart from dumb subservience and strike out in a negative and destructive way.”

I wonder what Mike Layton, a former senior detective who waged war on football’s villains and co-author of The Hooligans Are Still Among Us, made of the Hawthorns’ brawl.

He first targeted Birmingham’s Zulu Warriors through Operation Red Card. Then came GROWTH – Get Rid of Wolverhampton’s Troublesome Hooligans, launched in November, 1987, after Wolves yobs ran amok during a seaside fixture at Scarborough.

Mike, who rose to the rank of Chief Superintendent, said: “Using the same tactics successfully adopted on Red Card, officers were able to identify some 300 potential suspects in its early stages and resulted in a series of dawn raids in March 1988, when 250 officers raided 68 homes. More than 30 additional targets were dealt with in follow-up raids.”

Those swoops made dramatic headlines in the Express & Star. “It is 5.45am,” we reported, “and dawn is still an hour away as a fleet of unmarked cars and vans pull quietly away from Wednesfield police station.

“Inside are 250 police who will, within 15 minutes, beat the postmen to early morning knocks on doors of Black Country homes.”

Police secured around 60 convictions and 20 prison sentences.

There have, doubtless, been doors knocked following the Hawthorns tie.

Hooliganism is a very old disease. Methodology may have changed over the years. Motivation for it remains the same.

And the rise of social media has made the scars it leaves behind much more visible.