The build up to the sorry coach incident

A series of events led to a small minority of so called Hammers fans throwing objects which broke the blackout covering in front of windows on the Manchester United team coach.

There can be no excuse for the small minority of Hammers fans that threw the bottles and cans at the bus at the corner of Barking Road and Green Street but questions also need to be asked of the role of the Metropolitan police and Manchester United too.

When I arrived on Green street at 5.30pm it was already completely packed with over two hours before the scheduled kick-off and quickly became grid-locked with traffic. This became much worst when police vans and people carriers parked in the middle of Green Street which caused dangerous crowd crushing as fans were funnelled around cars and parked police vans. Some fans were scared and thought they could be injured.

The area around the Bobby Moore champions statue became a major crowd pinch point mainly due to the overspill of the Boleyn Pub who couldn’t handle the amount of fans wanting to drink in there one last time.

There were also many fans,  certainly hundreds, possibly as many as a few thousand without tickets for the game. These fans were in Green street, drinking in the local pubs to soak up the last night’s atmosphere which was hyped in the media all week.

The narrow streets and the entrance to the Boleyn ground players car park isn’t the easiest of places to get to at the best of times and questions have to be asked why Manchester United were late yet again after being fined £5,000 for their late arrival at White Hart Lane just last month.

You would think their transport organiser and the coach operator would have learnt their lesson and set out much earlier. They should have arrived around 4pm considering the plans for the night. It is claimed the team stayed just three miles away in a hotel in nearby Docklands but the coach hit traffic around East Ham just before 6pm and couldn’t move.

West Ham fans close to the statue were certainly in high spirits after many hours of drinking but were also frustrated at being forced back by police to allow the late Manchester United team coach through the packed East London streets.

In his post-match interview, LVG partially blamed yesterday’s loss on the coach incident and paper headlines suggested players were frightened and cowering but a player video from Jesse Lingard inside the coach showed many of them thought it was amusing and were joking around during the incident. It didn’t seem to bother them earlier in the match when they took the 2-1 lead, only later when they lost 3-2!

Disappointing headlines this morning of  ‘West Ham hooligans ambushed the Manchester United team bus’ and ‘West Ham’s Upton Park farewell turns into anarchy as mindless thugs go on the rampage’ will feed the media frenzy today that this was some kind of mass riot when video footage below shows the full extent of the short-lived incident.

The papers won’t mention the majority of the 35,000 crowd were well behaved and there was no other trouble or feared pitch invasion. It’s a real shame that most non-West Ham fans will remember this  event and not the last historic win over the Red Devils at the Boleyn Ground. I am sure we have not heard the last of this sorry episode and we will be in for some more West Ham fan bashing in the media over the coming weeks as the FA, club and Met Police all investigate.

What the minority of fans did to the coach was wrong but let’s not over react and pander to the media’s agenda.