Russian Slapping Contest

Looks risky for ears and eyes.

Seems a lot more sensible than boxing.

Russian men have an unfortunate rep for being lazy, drunken brutes.

LOL- they beat the hell out of a bunch of British football hooligans a few years ago, outright killed at least one of them. Ooops- this year promises to be worse:

Britain hasn't produced any football hooligans worthy of the name for at least a third of a century. During the 1980s, football clubs spent absolute fortunes to clean up the sport, including lifetime bans for fans engaging not only in violent physical contact with others, but all forms of provocative precursor behaviours. It took a long, long time to sort the problem out, but our fans are a totally different breed nowadays - almost civilised in fact!

No story reported in the world's greatest newspaper shouldn't be taken seriously. But I think the chances of Russian and English fans coming together at all for any reason will be made impossible by the Russian authorities, who are doubly anxious to hold an outstanding showpiece event and prove to the world that they're not the bad guys they're constantly portrayed as in the West.

Are you serious? The Russian government sponsors, organizes, trains and manages the ultra bunch.

Do you have some credible authority to cite for such an astounding remark?

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Of course he does not.

In Russia (and the Ukraine, and to a lesser extent some of the other former Soviet countries) there is a significant proportion of young men who train hard at martial arts. This is not because they are sponsored by the state - it is because there is often very little else worthwhile for them to spend their time and effort on, and because they live in a world where violence is much more part of everyday life. Individually, they are mostly normal nice people, like everyone else. In a mob, such as at football matches, they are mostly like mobs anywhere else. But when they get in violent conflict with other mobs, such as at football matches, they tend to be far better at the violence than the average British football hooligan.

Russia can certainly get some benefits from these "fighting fit" men - they make good army recruits. But there are no benefits whatsoever of having violent football hooligans abroad, so the Russian state would not be behind that.

As if Cursitor Doom had any grasp of what "civilised" might look like.

The Daily Express isn't the worst newspaper in the UK, but is definitely a member of the less impressive group of UK newspapers.

Stuff published in the Daily Express should be ignored unless you want to f ind out what idiots like Curistor Doom might be thinking.

The Russian authorities will be as brutally heavy-handed as ever in trying to conceal from the western press what a heavy-handed bunch of thugs they a re.

It won't be the same bunch of thugs that assassinate person of interest to the Russian government with military grade chemical warfare agents or polon ium (which you can only get by processing a lot of uranium ore) but the thu ggish character comes from the way the place is run, and the thugs who run it.