Cricket test

I'm not sure if we could have asked for more at Lords yesterday: warm sunshine, brilliant atmosphere, great seat, fine wine and a win for England against India in the Twenty20 match.

My only regret was an evens bet with my host on India to win; not because I lost, but because it created divided loyalties at the death.

Some people say that Twenty20 isn't real cricket. Others say it's the future. In one sense it's a little bit more like football as the outcome of a match can turn on one or two incidents and that means that the best team does not always win.

It would be a shame if test cricket was allowed to decline in favour of the one-day and Twenty20 games where cash generated by TV and crowd-pulling contests might begin to overshadow the 5-day game. But if you are looking for the heart and soul, the history and the heritage of cricket, most of the events that have made it such a great game have happened in test matches.

Indian supporters easily outnumbered those for England yesterday which made for a great atmosphere in the ground. I know these are international matches but the playing of the national anthems seemed a bit out of place in this atmosphere. When the Irish lined up for their anthem in the first match, hardly anyone sang. After listening to the Irish thumping out their anthem in Croke Park at rugby matches, it seemed odd to hear it played with barely a voice raised.

I'm reminded at these matches about Norman Tebbit's infamous "cricket test" of national sympathies. Most of the Indian crowd, I would guess, would be British nationals. So shouldn't they have been supporting England? I don't see why this should be an issue. It's natural to stay close to your roots in sport. I live in Surrey today but as a Yorkshireman I know which team I want to win the county championship, and it isn't Surrey.

It takes more than a passport and an oath of loyalty to turn your back on the country of your birth, or even your parents' birth. Well, it does for some. All it took for me was an evens bet on India to win.

Kilmainham Gaol, Croke Park and rugby union

It's always good to go to Dublin for the Ireland v England match. This year was special because of a change in venue. Ireland's Lansdowne Road stadium is being refurbished so the fixture was taking place in Croke Park run by the Gaelic Athletic Association.

But Croke Park is not just any old stadium. It's a very well appointed modern venue, the third biggest sports stadium in Europe with a capacity of more than 82,000. Yet hitherto it has confined itself only to Gaelic sports such as the all-Ireland Gaelic football and hurling championships.

There is a reason for this since in 1920 Croke Park was witness to one of the most notorious events in Ireland's long struggle for independence. The ground had already achieved some symbolic significance in the use of rubble from buildings wrecked in the 1916 Easter rising to construct one of the terraces, thereafter known as Hill 16.

Bloody Sunday

Then, on Sunday, November 21, a Gaelic football match between Dublin and Tipperary was brutally interrupted when police auxiliaries entered the ground and began firing on the crowd. The police were responding to a co-ordinated series of killings that morning when agents working for the British military had been murdered by hit squads loyal to Michael Collins, the Irish Republican leader.

Whether or not the shooting was a deliberate act of reprisal, or whether it was triggered by a nervous response to shots, real or imagined, from somewhere in the panicking crowd, is still far from clear. But at the end of the shooting some 14 people: 13 spectators and one player, Michael Hogan, the Tipperary captain, were dead or dying. Confusion in the aftermath was very similar to that after the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings in Londonderry when members of the British Paratroop Regiment shot 13 people dead during a civil rights march.

Ancient history? Not in Ireland. There was a great deal of heated debate before the Croke Park administrators agreed to host the six nations rugby internationals. Some in the press had predicted crowd trouble. But only those who have no knowledge of rugby or its supporters would conceive of such nonsense.

I travelled over with six friends - seven of us and six tickets, not the ideal combination, but a better position than the group of twenty England supporters we met who had a single ticket. They wouldn't part with it to make their misery and our happiness complete. Irritatingly we had been covered for tickets but due to a mix up in communications a couple of tickets had been let go elsewhere.

At some stage we would need to draw straws. The last time it happened, some who had put tickets in to the kitty had lost out when the names were drawn out of a hat. This time there would be only one of us out of luck. Everyone had fingers crossed.

Firing squad

We spent the Saturday morning at Kilmainham Gaol where, in May, 1916, fifteen of those who had organised and led the Easter uprising were taken out in to the prison yard and shot by firing squad. One prisoner, James Connolly, dying from a serious leg injury that had turned gangrenous, was brought from his hospital bed and strapped to a chair before he was shot.

I can recommend the prison tour for those who seek to get a better understanding of the events surrounding the Irish rebellion. The story of the prison was harrowing enough without any need for embellishment by our tour guide, Ciaran, who delivered an excellent and even-handed narrative.

Walking to the ground - yes I was one of the lucky ones - we saw two men standing with a poster in memory of Michael Hogan. There was a delay before the British National Anthem as Mary McAleese, the Irish President, was shown to her seat. The press reported that the mainly Irish crowd was respectful of the National Anthem. That was an understatement. I saw some wearing the green who were singing God Save the Queen and at least one in front of me removed his cap - more than I managed to do.

There was near silence on the few occasions when Jonny Wilkinson kicked for goal. The rest of the time the home supporters were raising the roof as the Irish ran up an embarrassingly convincing win by a thirty point margin: 43-13.

Hen parties

As others have said, there is a new spirit in Ireland that may not have forgotten the past but which no longer feels weighed down by history. That's a good thing. The slightly sad aspect of this, however, is that the centre of Dublin on a Saturday night is a succession of hen and stag parties dominated by the alco-pop crowd whose appreciation of history extends to last night's TV.

The singing pubs and their singing clientele seem to be disappearing in the trendier parts of Dublin where gastro-pubs are beginning to compete with the drinking only bars. Our post match sing song was confined to the trip back to the suburbs on the Dart railway ahead of an early ferry the next day.

We always sing, win or lose, but after a loss like that we might have been excused if the chariots were not on fire that night.

Football and the big stick

Why don't people learn? I'm not talking about just anyone here but about large organisations and people in influential positions. Specifically I'm talking about the football authorities but I know the question can be applied elsewhere.

In the UK the footballing authorities did not learn about the dangers associated with large stadiums and ground behaviour before a series of tragedies: Hillsborough, Heysel and the Bradford City stadium fire during the 1980s. There have been others: Rangers, Spartak Moscow, River Plate to mention just a few of them, but that cluster of disasters in the 1980s did much to concentrate UK thinking on remedies.

Big stick policing

In many of these situations crowd control measures relied on "big stick" policing and containment measures that viewed the people who watched football as little better than animals, hence the fences that caged-in football crowds throughout the 1970s and early 80s. I was shocked to see that the cage-like fences had been retained in the Lens stadium that hosted the Lille v Manchester United match last night.

Not only that, police at football matches, particularly in mainland Europe continue to treat football supporters as an unruly mob that can only be pacified by shields, batons, riot gear and tear gas. If you treat people like animals they begin to behave that way.

In the UK football clubs (because they had to do so after the Taylor report into the Hillsborough disaster) introduced all-seater grounds. That one remedy did much to reduce the mob-like behaviour that inflicted football in the 1970s. Family enclosures, supporters clubs and improvements in marketing have all helped to lessen football hooliganism immeasurably since the bad old days of the 1970s.

But not until football clubs are confident enough to mix-up home and away supporters will you get the kind of congeniality that exists in cricket and rugby grounds. Does anyone think that rugby supporters do not want their team to win? Of course they do. But they know that the game matters more than any team.

I have been going to rugby matches for years and the behaviour between rival supporters is always a matter of banter and nothing more. It's not unusual for a group of supporters to "adopt" a couple of rival supporters in the pub or on the way to the match. OK, the Welsh can get a bit uppity but they're sentimental people and their game means a lot to them. The English are still getting used to having a good rugby team (or they were).

The same applies to cricket. The banter between England and Australian fans can be incredibly cruel but it's almost always good natured and if it ever risks boiling over there are enough sensible supporters to police themselves.

Don't blame drink

Some have blamed drink for crowd violence. It's nothing to do with drink. The Guinness will be flowing this weekend in Dublin before the Croke Park match - and I will be having some myself - but there won't be any trouble. It's just as well because I have been in the thick of some real crowd squeezes at the old Lansdowne road. No one pushed. No one panicked.

Football hooliganism became a way of life for some young people in the 1960s and 70s. They grew up on the mean streets and took out their frustrations at weekends. Most of the people who watched rugby, on the other hand, played the game where the violence was confined to the pitch. Both codes have cleaned up their acts on and off the pitches. So it was a great shame to see police responding so inappropriately towards distressed fans when a crush happened at Lens. To fire tear gas at people struggling for space was inexcusable.

It was a shame, too, to hear the televised match commentator assuming that there was crowd trouble created by unruly supporters. If you assume the worst in people, expect them to repay you in kind. Any sports crowd should be a mixture of team colours. Segregating people, whether in sport or anywhere else, is a recipe for factionalism.

End segregation

Unfortunately this still goes in football. I have a good friend who supports Newcastle who took a friend from Manchester to St James's Park a little while ago for a Newcastle v Manchester United match. They were standing near the front of the Newcastle end when Manchester scored. The Manchester supporter cheered but it did not go down well. He might in fact have been tolerated by the crowd but the stewards were taking no risks and frog-marched him out of the ground. This a middle-aged chap in a respectable profession. This is one aspect of football that the clubs still need to tackle. But it has to be on a European scale.

There shouldn't be a ground left in Europe that still contains football supporters within fences. Opposing fans should be encouraged to mingle, not discouraged from sitting together. The days of police escorts for visiting fans should end. The people best placed to make these changes are not the authorities but older supporters who should set standards for the youngsters. Insults and obnoxious or aggressive behaviour should be stamped on through peer pressure. If clubs pass on this message the core support will understand.