Land of woke & fury: Even with sport canceled, English 'football fans' are embarrassing themselves in a confused war on 'wokeness'

It seems that even with their sport canceled, English football fans have managed to find novel ways to embarrass themselves in summer with a debauched circus of violence in an unexpected war against the woke brigade.

This summer’s Euro 2020 Championship was one of the first to fall victim to the mass cancelation of sporting events due to the Covid-19 outbreak, as the pan-continental football tournament was not unfairly deemed perhaps not the best way to combat a pandemic that had hit Europe with particular spite.

Initially, that simply meant the world would have to wait just another 12 months to enjoy a much-needed festival of football as the world recovered from the spread of a deadly virus. In the long run, it meant grumpy gatherings of large, lumpy-looking men in cheap, ill-fitting sportswear and filled with strong lager, vitriol, and songs of war would be without an outlet for their fetish for terrorizing timid locals for an entire summer.

Clashes flare at a protest held by the Democrats Football Lads Alliance - Getty Images / Aaron Chown

Alas, football’s finest were not forlorn for long, and an opportunity arose when political and racial tensions between civilians and law enforcement stemming from the death of George Floyd carried across the Atlantic and planted itself in the center of London.

Masked civilians in coronavirus-repellent protective gear transformed into masked protesters shielding their identity as they tussled with police and toppled statues in the name of equality, and when demonstrations tiptoed into outright history whitewashing by the woke mob masses, that’s when the football lads mobilized.

Just as at the Russia 2018 World Cup, the most recent major football tournament, when surly groups of grown men in tunics and coats of armour gathered on Red Square with arms outstretched to bellow out songs of German bombers being shot down by the RAF from England, football fans flocked to the scenes of freneticism around another famous landmark, this time on Parliament Square, the site of a statue to Winston Churchill.

The Democratic Football Lads Alliance were this time the ringmasters of the big top, an association of football supporters set up, officially, 'Against All Extremism' and the phoenix movement formed from the original ‘Football Lads Alliance’ group, but which has since been found to essentially disguise a murky body of far-right ideology.

A battalion of terrace lads congregated at the foot of The Cenotaph in Central London, ready to defend the war memorial against a Black Lives Matter rally. A rally that had already been canceled. But such was the determination to incite football violence without any football, the lads alliance launched into nearby police who had actually been deployed to protect the monument, rendering the alliance recruits largely redundant.

Jonathan Brady - PA Images

Not content with protecting the country’s most famous war memorial by attacking the very officers present to officially protect it, the lads then decided to voice their support for posthumously besieged former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, but in a bizarre deviation from proudly singing about RAF bombers, chose to serenade the Prime Minster who led the country to victory over Adolf Hitler... with Nazi salutes. 

The icing on the irony cake came in the form of football fan Andrew Banks, who was caught urinating next to a plaque in honor of the police officer killed protecting the public during the 2017 Westminster Attack, the incident of terrorism which claimed five innocent lives and spawned the idea to form the very concept of a Football Lads Alliance against extremism.

Banks insisted in the dock he had been on an all-night bender before the protest and turned up to 'defend statues' without being sure of which ones to defend, an explanation that would likely put him in the majority of those who had turned up, and echoed the familiar behavior of the football hooligan in its natural habitat. His defense was deemed as poor as the Alliance’s defense of the memorials and Banks was banged up for 14 days.

The scenes witnessed over the weekend are hardly surprising given the long-standing reputation of angry-at-everything English football fans, and with football canceled for the summer, the need for conflict and rampant xenophobia disguised as patriotism and banter was amplified, so much so that with nowhere to go, it happened closer to home.

Perhaps the ultimate irony of the Alliance's antics was not the Nazi salutes in defence of Churchill, nor the urinating on memorials they were supposed to defend, but the football lads' need to invent an excuse to be angry and offended and settle on the target of a woke brigade they accuse of being angry and offended by everything. Remind me, who are the woke ones again?