unfortunately i was working last night driving trains in to and out of manchester, my depot is manchester victoria which is less than 100 yards from one of the fan zones set up with a big screen tv.
I did one trip to blackpool and back and my train was packed with rangers suporters and the trip went without incident so i was reasonably happy.
Where it went sour was when i was asked to go to piccadilly station on the other side of town to remove a vandalised unit and take it to the depot, all the trams had been cancelled due to safety concerns in town and taxis where refusing to go in to town so i said i would walk which normally takes 15 minuits.
I had hardley stepped out of victoria when i was confronted by the first rangers fan demanding that i get him a taxi to the city of manchester stadium as the trams where not running, unfortunately me bing in uniform made me a target and it took me over 1 hour and countless confrontations some quite threatening against me before i could get to picadilly station.
I witnessed some disgracefull behaviour which has been kept from the press and the city absolutely stunk of urine and was in a filthy state newspapers had been torn to shreds and thrown all over the gardens and streets broken beer bottles where strewn every where thousands and thousands of empty beer cans on the pavements and in my short walk 7 individual cases of unconsious drunks receiving medical attention, at 9.30 pm the ambulance service refused to enter the city without a police escort after crews where attacked.
All in all concidering the amount of rangers fans in the city i supose it was a minority that caused the problems shown on tv but it was each and every one of them that made our city such a disgrace, they blamed the failure of the big screen in picadilly gardens for the problems but nobody has reported the fact that the engineer who tried to fix it only gave up becouse he was under attack from fans throwing beer bottles at him as he tried to rectify the fault so they spoilt it for themselves with mindless violence.
Even today we have witnessed the odd bits of violance as the so called fans continue with drinking as much as they can before returning home.
Shame on them, they blame manchester for letting them down but they let everybody down, all of our bylaws regarding drinking where relaxed and they abused it.