Do we need to worry about football violence again?

Dear readers — a “concerning” rise in antisocial behaviour at football matches has put Liverpool and Everton fans in the spotlight, we take a look in today’s briefing. Plus, we recommend a concert for Ukraine, an existential evening on Lark Lane, and some great nostalgic photos of BMX riders in 1980s Merseyside.

Our weekend read was an update about Caroline, who we first met in April. She was finding the cost of living crisis unbearable, and once wrote on her Universal Credit account: “This is why people kill themselves, because they can’t provide for their children.” Since writing that piece, a reader got in touch to help her navigate the benefits system, and a happy ending follows. Read that piece here.

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The big story: Do we need to worry about football violence again?

Top line: Everton fans are at the centre of a debate over football hooliganism. Arrests for antisocial behaviour at football matches were up 38% in the first half of the season, according to BBC reporting, alongside more than 800 football-related arrests. The FA says it is “very concerned”. 

Recent incidents include: 

• Fans invading the pitch twice at the Everton v Crystal Palace match at Goodison Park last Thursday. Everton won 3-2 and narrowly avoided relegation.
• Later that evening, a large group hurled bricks and bottles at two police cars on County Road. Seven arrests have been made.
• An altercation between an Everton fan and Crystal Palace boss Patrick Vieira, where CCTV footage shows the fan taunting Vieira, who kicks the fan. No formal complaint has been made and police confirmed they will take no further action.

What’s driving the rise in disorder? A spike in cocaine and alcohol use have been cited as possible contributing factors. There might also be an aspect of copy-cat behaviour with the pitch invasions we have seen at the end of this season. 

Lockdown legacy: Liverpool’s race equality chief Rishi Jain says there was a huge increase in discriminatory and offensive behaviour from fans across the Premier League this season, saying that since lockdown: “I think people have forgotten how to behave.”

Interestingly, in a study of the changing nature of football clubs and their surrounding communities, a source was quoted saying Liverpool FC has “stolen Anfield from its community” and blames the club for the decline of his neighbourhood and a rise in antisocial behaviour.

Anfield is not only Liverpool FC, but it is also about thousands of people who live here. Liverpool FC has sold Anfield globally and has got a world reputation as a working-class community-based football club. But they knocked us down. Now we’re an area which is deprived and considered the highest locale of crime and antisocial behaviour.

This morning, BBC Radio Merseyside presenter Paul Salt observed that while the pitch invasion at Manchester City didn’t make headlines, Liverpool fans booing the national anthem at the FA Cup final at Wembley made a full front-page splash in the Mail on Sunday, suggesting that the spotlight might be unfairly targeted towards Liverpool and Everton fans.

Bottom line: Dr Martha Newson, an expert in football fan behaviour at Oxford University, says the rise in antisocial behaviour might be a society-wide problem, signalling group strength in tumultuous times and a wider distrust of authorities. “It's not appropriate to make a moral panic about football specifically. As it often does, football is holding up a mirror to wider society.”

Your Post briefing

• Liverpool's shopping footfall rose above pre-pandemic levels almost immediately after restrictions ended, according to the giant property company Grosvenor Group. Grosvenor owns Liverpool ONE as well as large chunks of London, and its chief executive Mark Preston specifically mentioned Liverpool’s fast return to the shops when announcing a massive increase in profit on Radio 4 this morning. More here, and go deeper with our piece about how Liverpool city centre is changing after the pandemic.
• The Liver Building was lit up in orange last night to commemorate the victims of the Manchester Arena attack, where 23 people died at an Ariana Grande concert. Among the victims was Megan Hurley, whose parents run a sandwich shop in Liverpool. She was just 15-years-old when she died. 
• Children’s services are “too often rigid, remote, stuck in crisis mode and disconnected from the needs of families” and need urgent investment and complete overhaul, according to Josh MacAlister, who chaired an independent review of children’s social care in England. More here. Last week, we reported that a commissioner has been sent in to oversee Sefton Council’s struggling children’s services after a report cited an “overreliance” on the private sector and repeated failures to improve the quality of care.
• Jake Berry, the head of the Northern Research Group of Tory MPs is calling for a Northern Minister to secure the Red Wall vote at the next general election, saying there are specific needs the North has that Westminster doesn’t understand. “Frankly, if we don’t win seats in the North then Boris Johnson is not going to be prime minister,” Berry says. More here.
• Injuries related to dog bites and dog attacks have doubled in the last 15 years, according to data seen by The Times, with people on Merseyside ten times more likely to need hospital attention than those in north London. The RSPCA says this could be down to impulse buys during the pandemic and animals’ social skills being underdeveloped due to increased time indoors. More here, and go deeper with this analysis by an expert in human-animal interaction at the University of Liverpool, who says our relationship with pets may be to blame.

Home of the week

A three-bedroom terrace in Crosby Village just came on the market for £290,000. It has a front and back garden, plus an original fireplace.

Post Picks

🛶 Fancy spending your Tuesday evening in a very long canoe with 20 other people? Well, you wouldn’t be alone, because dragon boating claims to be the fastest growing sport in the world. It’s a uniquely social way to keep fit and can be trialled for free at Liverpool Watersports Centre with expert coaches. 

🗣 Does modern life lack meaning? A perfect question for a Thursday evening. Join the South Liverpool Debating society at 7pm (or 6:30pm for the pre-debate dinner) at Keith’s Food and Wine Bar and send yourself spiralling into an existential rut in time for the weekend. More here. 

🍷 Wine, chocolate and Irish Folk music (courtesy of Blackthorn Root, “the Wirral's favourite Ceilidh band”) are all on the menu next Friday at West Kirby Arts Centre. The evening is in aid of Restart on the Wirral, a charity helping refugee families settle in the area. Tickets are £10.50 for a good cause.

🎨 Two Liverpool artists have a mini-exhibition at a former industrial garage in Birkenhead on Friday evening. The exhibition guide is skinny on detail — apparently “there will be a variety of styles and sizes available in vibrant colours” — but it’s a free event, with music and drinks.

⚽️ And one to book up ASAP. Next Saturday, the Bombed Out Church will be showing the Champions League final live, as Liverpool play Real Madrid. Garden tickets are on their third release already so Reds really should be quick. Blues meanwhile, head directly to your nearest large rock and bunker down until it's over.

The lost photos of BMX on the streets of Merseyside

Antony Frascina, Clint Pilkington and Andrew Rigby took breaks from their day jobs in Merseyside and Manchester to put together We Were Rad, a social documentary photobook exploring BMX culture in the North West in the 1980s. Told through 1,200 images, it’s a nostalgic ode to the freedoms that came with playing out late and riding your first bike. Thanks to the team for letting us feature a few of their great images from the series.

Our favourite reads

We liked this story of the utopian dream of the Solar Campus in Wallasey in Tribune Magazine. It’s by Post reader Lynsey Hanley, who lives in Liverpool and wrote Estates, a brilliantly researched and very readable history of social housing in this country. The Solar Campus was opened as St George’s Secondary Modern School in 1961 with a vast south-facing glass wall intended to trap light and heat and distribute it through the school, with ambitions of hundreds of eco-schools following. But the windowless north-facing side of the building made it look like a young offenders’ institute, and state school kids resented the structure. Amid the mass building programme of state schools across the country in the 1950s and ‘60s, it stuck out as different and strange, and is now in a state of disrepair.

There’s a great feature about the parents who sacrificed their Liverpool season tickets for their children by the Guardian’s northern editor Helen Pidd. We liked this passage about the pubs outside Anfield Stadium: “There was no chance of getting inside the pub. It had been rammed all afternoon. When punters complained from the pavement that they could not see the game, the landlady gave them no sympathy. ‘How do you think I feel? It’s my fucking pub and I can’t see it either,’ she said.”

For the last three decades, former boxer Billy Moore has struggled with drug addiction and spent time in and out of prison. In this powerful story in Big Issue North, he speaks movingly about how watching his life play out on screen — a film adaptation of his time in a Thai prison was released to great acclaim — made him feel shame, and a day after the premiere at Cannes in May 2017, he was back in a crack den in Liverpool, still wearing his tuxedo. Now, he’s sworn off drugs and drink, and is devoting himself to his son and new partner. “I don’t need to be this labelled junkie or criminal. It’s not who I want to be, it’s not who I really am.”

An interesting feature in The Economist about the “Wagatha Christie” trial, the high-profile defamation battle between Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy, who is suing Rooney for publicly accusing Vardy of selling stories about her to The Sun. It looks at how the tabloid press has come to mimic social media, and how the floods of inane updates about footballers’ wives is coming to consume them. “When [Coleen] first started dating Wayne Rooney as a teenager, paparazzi would follow her to school. Her relationship with the Sun is particularly difficult: she and her husband are both from Liverpool.”

Letters from readers

What a terrible, damning and glaring example of just how cruel the benefits system really is. The whole system is designed to deceive and discourage claimants from actually receiving the benefits to which they are genuinely entitled ‘One message changed everything’, Baz

Growing up in Page Moss we used to walk or cycle to the woods often in the 1950s. They were known universally as “Bluebell Woods” — and the more daring amongst us even suggested there was a naturist camp nearby. Much of the farmland in that area has disappeared under motorways and housing, and of course the rash of warehousing. My favourite was Gateacre Path from Roby station across the farms past “first pond”, “second pond” and “third pond” to what became Netherley. Perhaps I’ll revisit and see what’s been lost ‘The threat to Knowsley’s ancient woodland’, Kevin