After all these years I thought I was unshockable but, yes, they shook me, too. Welcome to Euro 2000. Celebrate the latest international jamboree of the beautiful game. You may, of course, finish up dead but at least you'll get a decent funeral. They'll pile up floral tributes on your doorstep and shower your hearse with rose petals.
Football fans are most punctilious about honouring their heroic dead.
The scariest thing about it all is the equanimity with which such catastrophic possibilities are accepted - but don't blame the Belgians for pragmatic preparation. In nearby Brussels 15 years ago, following a match between Liverpool and Juventus, they had 39 corpses on their hands. Belgium is co-hosting Euro 2000 with Holland and it may not please respectable householders in either country that between them they are paying for 71,000 police to be deployed in an attempt to keep the peace. Holland is not being quite so extreme about it as Belgium. They are merely releasing prisoners with less than a month of their sentences to serve in order to make cell-room for arrested hooligans, the convenient euphemism for the dedicated and violent terrorists with anarchic motives who have attached themselves to football.