Hooliganism A Big Problem In Bandy

BOULDER, Colorado -- While searching on the Internet for bandy videos to show to a friend of mine, I came across a website, Bandyhools.com. This site is dedicated to bandy hooligans, people who only go to games to get outrageously drunk and start fights with the rival team's fans, or whoever is unfortunate enough to get in their way.

Hooliganism is a rampant problem in European sports, perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in Russia, but I had always thought that bandy was relatively free of this scourge. In all my years of watching the sport, only once did I ever hear of a case of severe hooliganism - a bunch of thugs overturned a bus in Irkutsk after a match with Yenisei Krasnoyarsk in 2002 - and even then I was not myself witness to it. Irkutsk is by no means a city without violence, but for a club that routinely attracts 15,000 fans, all are pretty well behaved. The brawls in the stands and the hurling of road flares so common in other stadiums is unheard of.

Sports hooliganism is prevalent everywhere, even in my own town. But in North America, it is usually of a different character; while often no less destructive, American hooligans are usually just people who act incredibly foolish while in the throes of sporting exuberance, fueled by alcohol and stupidity. In few places will you find the skin-headed, jack-booted thugs who roam around stadiums looking only for fights, supposedly in the name of their favorite team, like you see in nearly every Russian stadium.

While working for a Russian television station, I worked with a guy in his mid-twenties who was a dedicated Dynamo Moscow hooligan. It did not matter what the sporting event was - soccer, hockey, bandy, volleyball, archery - he and his crew were there to start trouble. He defended the hooligan culture as just young me trying to have some fun. There was never any real danger, he said, and no one got seriously hurt. He decided to leave his thug life behind, though, when a 15-year-old fan was murdered at a soccer match in St. Petersburg between hometown Zenit and Dynamo in 2000. (For a good discussion of soccer hooliganism, check out Franklin Foer's "How Soccer Explains the World").

I was somewhat heartened to see no mention of Baikal-Energia on this hooligan site. Our fans are more interested in actually watching and playing bandy than in kicking people while they are on the ground, though getting outrageously drunk is not out of the question.

So, cut the shit, hooligans. You thugs suck.