WORLD CUP ’90 : English 0, Dutch 0; Hooligans Quelled : World Cup: Italian authorities control a pregame charge by 1,000, limiting the incident to nine injuries. In the game, two goals by England are nullified.
Attacking with elan, a resurgent England outplayed the Netherlands but had to settle for a tie Saturday in World Cup action marred by pregame street violence.
With two English goals nullified, the match between two of the strongest Cup teams wound up 0-0.
On the streets of Cagliari, free-swinging Italian riot police were way ahead of English soccer hooligans early Saturday.
The helmeted police, resolutely interposed between supporters of two nations infamous for soccer violence, outnumbered English and Dutch fans as well as the Italian youths and photographers who crowded the streets of this old port city after the most potentially violent event in the monthlong soccer extravaganza.
England, adjusting to add a fifth back, installed to blunt Dutch attacks down the middle, dominated a fast, cool and clean match played without so much as a yellow card.
Early in the second half, England’s Gary Lineker scored on a slick cross from Paul Parker but lost the goal when referee Zoran Petrovic ruled Lineker had handled the ball.
In the waning moments, England, a quicker, hungrier team than the cumbersome club that tied Ireland early in the week, lost a second goal on a mistake. On what should have been an indirect kick from just outside the Dutch area, Stuart Pearce netted the ball directly on a wicked, curving shot that gave Dutch keeper Hans van Breukelen no chance.
The beefed-up English defense effectively shut down Holland’s talented trio of attackers--Ruud Gullit, Marco van Basten and Frank Rijkaard. Gullit, returning from a idle year to recover from knee surgery, seemed not to have recovered his full form.
“We were lucky to get a draw,” Gullit said.
Holland outshot England, 12-8, but most tries came from outside and never tried 40-year-old keeper Peter Shilton, who, on Queen Elizabeth’s official birthday, played his 120th international match Saturday--more than any player in the history of the game.
With orange-clad Dutch supporters and Union Jack-draped English carefully separated and watched by 1,500 police, there was no trouble inside the stadium.
After the game ended, Dutch fans were hustled to waiting buses while the English--a dangerous minority of hooligans among them--were left to ponder England’s Cup future: a match against feisty Egypt here Thursday on which will hinge England’s chance for advancement into the second round.
When the English were permitted to leave, it was to encounter intimidating legions of police on the streets of a city whose people are fed up with the hooligans among them.
Although the hooligans had in general behaved better than expected in the week leading up to the match, there was trouble Saturday even before it began.
About three hours before the match, perhaps 1,000 English fans marching toward the stadium charged a police barricade, witnesses said.
Riot police fired tear gas and shots into the air to disperse the English hooligans in a series of skirmishes through city streets. At least 200 hooligans, gathered by police at a gas station, were detained, but nearly all were later released, police said. The toll: two policemen and seven hooligans injured--two of them hospitalized.
The hooligans met police charges with rocks and bottles. At least two policemen were driven away bleeding from head wounds after being struck with stones. Four ambulances with injured sped from the scene of one clash.
While three helicopters hovered around the site of the clashes, orderly files of Dutch fans marched singing into the stadium.
Eric Taylor, a California teenager traveling through Europe before entering the University of California at Berkeley this fall, watched perplexed from among a group of anti-hooligan England supporters as the tension built in downtown Cagliari under a hot pregame sun.
“They’re all saying there’s going to be bad trouble after the game. The hooligans don’t seem interested in the game itself; just how things are going ‘to go up’ after it,” Taylor said.
Before Saturday’s action, a week of bar brawling in Sardinia had left 32 English fans awaiting trial, three serving short sentences for vandalism and one expelled after receiving a six months sentence, according to Kay Coombs, an information officer for the British Embassy.
Mindful of the hooligans’ reputation, Cup organizers assigned England to Cagliari on the theory that an island would be harder and more expensive to reach than a mainland game site. The watchful British government, whose anti-hooligan police have worked with Italian detectives for months, estimated that there were about 6,000 English fans and 8,500 Dutch supporters in the 38,000-seat stadium Saturday.
With all three of England’s first-round games in Sardinia, that also meant that English fans--and the minority of hooligans among them--would be on the island for a long two weeks.
As the Holland match neared, it was clear that many Sardinians already had had enough of loud, look-a-like English louts: Union Jack shorts, beer bellies, tattoos, an earring and, often, a skin head.
In the resort of Pula, south of Cagliari, townsfolk watched with undisguised scorn as English supporters lugged away cases of beer Friday to beat a day-of-game ban on the sale of alcohol.
“They are all right until they get drunk--which is nearly all the time,” a disgusted restaurant owner said.
English clubs have been banned from international play since a hooligan-inspired riot killed 39 fans--most of them Italian--at a European Champions Cup final match between Liverpool and Juventus in Brussels in 1985. International soccer officials made clear from the outset that good World Cup behavior would be crucial to English attempts to have the ban lifted.
The security net around homey Sant-Elia Stadium two miles from downtown Cagliari was the keystone of nationwide Cup vigilance involving the biggest and fittest 45,000 members of three different Italian police forces in the 12 cities hosting games.
Although the Sardinian capital had drawn most pre-World Cup security attention, drunken West German louts blindsided planners with a stunning rampage in Milan last Sunday after Germany debuted with an easy victory over Yugoslavia.
Among 72 Germans arrested in the Italian north, 15 were sentenced to jail terms and 45 expelled after incidents that drew a formal diplomatic apology from the West German government. Only a few scuffles followed West Germany’s second victory over the United Arab Emirates Friday night.
Both England and Holland, among the pre-tournament favorites, went into Saturday’s game with one point after lackluster draws in the opening game.
