If, as L. P. Hartley put it, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”, then for many English football fans this week that country looks like Italy or Spain. Watching the pictures of police beating up my fellow Manchester United supporters in Rome, and the similar scenes involving Spurs fans in Seville, felt like a throwback to another era.

How attitudes seem to have changed. In 1974, after police in Rotterdam baton-charged Spurs fans at the Uefa Cup final, Bill Nicholson, the Tottenham manager, condemned his own supporters as “a disgrace to Britain”. This week Martin Jol, Tottenham’s present manager, and the club hierarchy came out in support of their fans, and even British ministers joined in Manchester United’s criticism of the “heavy-handed” policing in Rome. English fans have gone from being villains to helpless victims.

Reactions in Italy and Spain, however, pinned the blame on drunken English hooligans as they would have done in the past. Italian commentators made reference to the 1985 European Cup final, when 39 Juventus fans died after Liverpool supporters charged and a wall collapsed at Heysel stadium. Although our tastes in football and much else are now more European than ever, there seems to be a culture gap.

Of course, not everybody who follows English teams abroad is a Boy Scout, even if they sometimes act like overgrown schoolboys. But to me the most striking image of the night in Rome was the picture of the dazed United fan with blood pouring from his head — and a camera hanging around his neck. Many supporters had come to Rome as tourists from Planet Premiership’s world of family-friendly entertainment, and were shocked to find themselves in a world where football is still a battleground.

Twenty years ago, our police may never have had the baton-swinging “style” of the Carabinieri. Yet from the Government downwards the official attitude here, too, was that football fans — and especially away fans — were a law-and-order problem, to be frogmarched to the ground and caged. That attitude of loathing and contempt culminated in 96 Liverpool fans being crushed to death at Hillsborough in 1989, where the initial reaction of police was to treat those trying to escape as pitch invaders.

It was after Hillsborough that everything changed, as the building of all-seater stadiums coincided with the Italia ’90 World Cup to make football in England fashionable and respectable again. In Europe, meanwhile, they are still caging fans in and lashing out at any sign of trouble. As recently as the previous round of the European Cup, United fans in Lens who tried to escape from a crush in a pen were tear-gassed by French riot police.

Little wonder that this week’s violence in Europe came as such a shock, when top-flight football in England has been transformed into family entertainment and stadiums have become laboratories for sophisticated techniques of surveillance and control. Yet this sanitisation of English football has also cost us in terms of atmosphere. The football-watching experience today is more pleasant, but less passionate. The European contrast is striking here, too; watching a match in Napoli’s curva sud a few years back, where the riot police ringed the pitch, was electrifying compared with the relative peace and quiet of my seat at Old Trafford.

Since the recent death of a policemen at a match, there have been demands for the Italian authorities to catch up with British techniques of crowd control, such as CCTV. At the same time, there are English fans trying to recreate the European atmosphere at matches by setting up groups of “ultras” — which, despite their reputation, are often more like semi-official supporters’ clubs than mafia families.

On both sides of the Euro-divide, one thing that is lost when discussing football is a sense of perspective — historical, emotional or otherwise. Today we have blown football up into such an important symbol of national prestige that any trouble associated with it can become a diplomatic incident. Whatever one thinks of some statements coming out of Italy this week, Europe might unite behind the mayor of Rome’s reflection that it is only “a football match, after all”.

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