IF A picture is worth a thousand words then a video is a whole novel and it is not a pretty one either for Rangers as their shame was dispatched to the four corners of the globe at the flick of a button on Wednesday evening. In today's multimedia press there is hardly any need for a report when a film of the events is so much more shocking.
In the wake of the disturbing events before, during and after the UEFA cup final in Manchester, the rest of the world woke up with a humdrum match report of Rangers' loss accompanied by a hair-raising video of baying hordes on the rampage. Over break
fast tables from San Francisco to Sydney and Buenos Aires, you could be forgiven for wondering whether the scenes depicted were from Helmand Province, Basra or the Gaza Strip instead of the streets of Manchester.
In Argentina they know a thing or two about football violence so a brief reference to "drunken hordes leaving their mark on the city" was enough to give the flavour of what happened to the readers of Clarin in Buenos Aires before suggesting a look at the infamous video.
La Nacion took the incident as a prompt to remind everyone that they have their own troubles in Argentina and that 3,140 police will oversee the four big upcoming matches in their own league. There's nothing like someone else's problems to make you feel you are not alone in the world with fan violence.
Though famously reluctant to cover anything outside their country, the American press posted the infamous video in most of its big titles. The LA Times took it as a chance to lambast the Mother Country by blaming the breakdown of the giant screen in Piccadilly Gardens, widely reported as a catalyst, as "indicative of England's apparent inability to get anything right these days".
The New York Times cross-referenced an article that appeared in 1993 after an exhibition match Rangers played in Sunderland with strikingly similar results. Then the chairman David Murray was quoted as saying: "People who have been involved in the trouble will not be back and we may have to consider our position about playing matches in England."
The San Francisco Chronicle was almost exclusively about the violence with a brief reference to the match as though it was an optional extra. Another article naively mused on why America does not have violence in sports, almost as though they were missing something.
Most of the world press relied on agency reports, but the Italian Gazzetto dello Sport dispatched a correspondent who penned the most dramatic eyewitness account outside the British press. Entitled Night of Madness, it painted a nightmare scenario of drunken fans from ten in the morning devastating the city centre. The paper urged its readers to download the video.
In Norway, Verdens Gang scarcely mentioned the match but had pictures of the vast crowds outside the stadium as well as scenes of running battles. Not one of its three headlines referred to the match but to the mayhem during and after the game as well as the stabbing of a Zenit fan.
A cursory glance at the world's press would have presented the reader with a useful glossary of violence in a variety of languages. No one yet has mentioned the obvious in Austria and Switzerland about the relief that no home nation will be present at the summer's European Nations championship. Their outlets mainly concentrated on the positive aspects of the event, with the Bin Laden threat getting more of an airing than what happened in Manchester.
In Moscow, though, there is high anxiety about Wednesday's Champions League final. The newly appointed sports minister, Vitali Mutko, who attended the Rangers-Zenit match, flew back to be met by headlines in the Moscow press flagging up "Carnage in Manchester".
Clearly worried, Mutko immediately announced that reinforcements would be drafted in from the Interior Ministry to police Chelsea and Manchester United fans. "I urge you to respect our customs and the people who live in our city," he said. "In football there is always a winner and a loser and I ask the losing fans to behave."
The full article contains 723 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
