I t was shortly after the final whistle had blown on England’s semi-final victory over the Netherlands that the barrage began. First one plastic cup landed in the press box, beer exploding from it in a sticky fountain, then another and another until all you could hear other than the insistent PA was the crump of plastic on desk and the shouts of journalists taking hits and trying to protect their laptops. Looking up towards the tier from which they came, there was a terrible beauty to it, the cups with their furls of lager illuminated in the floodlit sky, falling slowly with an implausible grace before their liquid detonation.
Nobody in the real world cares about the gripes of journalists – and rightly so. Our working conditions, the mechanics of getting accredited, the perfunctory yet demeaning security checks, even the pointless and largely unworkable new seat selection tool (not available on mobile) are of interest to nobody but journalists –although it would be nice if at some point Uefa gave a moment of practical consideration. But the scenes on Wednesday were symptomatic of much greater issues.
At every game in Dortmund at this tournament, sometimes in celebration, sometimes in fury, beer has been flung from the upper tier down on to the seats below. This is, obviously, dangerous. Being hit by a hard plastic glass full of beer that has fallen 30 or 40 feet hurts.
People in those seats may come from a religious or cultural background in which alcohol is forbidden; .
