Nothing much to report. A fan has been stopped at Stansted airport. Another nine were detained trying to sneak in through the Czech Republic. Then the likely lads got a bit lairy and threw some bottles in Frankfurt the other night, and a few got a arrested, not for violence, but for being drunk and disorderly. Pussy shit, as Christy would probably say. But it's not gone off yet. After the saturation of weeks in the German press, this violent blankness is all rather depressing. Is it just that the press has been instilling a darkness in our hearts again? Are the police really that well organised? They seem to have every situation under control, with foreign police carted in to help out on all sides.

But what the police are not doing is pulling an Italia '90, where they allowed an army of English fans to rampage through Sardinia, and then trapped them in a suburban street and beat the shit out of every last one of them. They didn't even bother to arrest them, they just broke their bones and left.

Japan and South Korea was an exception, because no-one expected crowd violence in a land so expensive to get to, but here in the playground of the nations, with the Serbs, the Croats, the English and the Dutch merely an idea away, street battles seem inevitable. Whatever will happen, Anglofritz will be there, sucking its eyes out.