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Mann Overboard

by | 18th, June 2004

‘AS miscarriages of justice go, there can be no bigger case of mistaken identify and plain wrongness than the lot of some of our fine lads in Portugal.

‘Two goals in the last minute against the French and now this. How unlucky can one man get?’

Each time it’s the same old story: the local, foreign police are a bunch of think hotheads who, bent on violence and culturally ignorant of British ways, mistake a cheeky bunch of rapscallions in high spirits for a mob of painfully dim pissed–up hooligans.

So, it’s with our customary heavy heart that we turn to the Independent and catch up with Garry Mann, the so-called ringleader of a riot in Albufeira.

And Garry, who is now starting a two-year jail sentence for his part in the mayhem, is not being forgotten by the good people propped up against the bar at the Railway Hotel in Faversham, Kent.

“How can he be the ringleader?” asks a man not ashamed to be known as a friend of Mann’s. “He was a firefighter, for God’s sake; these guys are the best.”

How very true! That alone should secure Mann’s immediate release, but we fear the Portuguese will not be swayed from what passes for justice in their land so easily.

There needs to be more if we are to free The Faversham One. And help is one the way.

The Independent goes on to say: “Family and friends of Mann…believe he is the victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and crucially, with his shaven head and muscular fireman’s build, simply sticking out in a crowd.”

“He’s in bits,” says his sister-in-law Bernadette (shaven head, heavy fireman’s build). “He’s innocent. He wasn’t even in the area when the trouble broke out.”

This is getting murkier by the minute. He wasn’t there! In which case, where was he? In a church? Taking tea in a cake shop? Saving a family and their pet cat from a burning building?

Or what about in a shop buying clothes?

If Mann was getting a new outfit, the Guardian has a cautionary tale for him and others like him as it profiles “hooligan chic”, the outfit sported by the authors of mayhem.

For anyone not wanting to be taken for a total dickhead, the Guardian lists the things you need to avoid wearing lest you be branded a hooligan and banged up in a cell.

The items are: Aquascutum cap, Hackett T-shirt, Burberry shorts, Adidas socks, Puma trainers, pint of lager, cross of St George tattoo (“often emblazoned with the name of some small market town in the Midlands”), stainless steel wristbands…

…large, yellow helmet, retractable hose, metal pole…’



Posted: 18th, June 2004 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink