Credit where it's due....

[TANGODANCER]

When I was in Frankfurt it was the Polish chaps that were looking for a scrap with the English.

17 pints apiece? Pah, I supped more boiling tar!

Ironic, since helping the Poles was the reason we got into the war anyway.

[kissoffboardy]

Astonished bar keeper Herrmann Murr said: "Never have I seen so many drink so much in such little time."

Has he been taking public speaking lessons from tapes of Churchill speeches?

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

Astonished bar keeper Herrmann Murr said: "Never have I seen so many drink so much in such little time."

Has he been taking public speaking lessons from tapes of Churchill speeches?

"Never in the field of alcohol consumption..."

[50sQuiff]

The french drink while they're buying bread, the Germans have beer at breakfast, the dutch serve beer in mcdonalds, the polish make a spirit you can run cars on and the russians pickle themselves in vodka. So the English drink a lot, so do lots of nations.

Alcohol itself is not the issue, why is drinking 5 pints before a game such a bad example to a kid? It needs to be placed in context. Smoking 20 a day, being 4 stone overweight and doing no exercise are worse examples.

Alcohol is only an issue when it is linked to violence. The 100s of thousands of English fans have drunk millions of pints, the result? Very little trouble until the two sets of fans everybody expected to cause touble appeared - the Germans and the Polish, neither nation having taken any action to look at their hooligan problem.

On the whole, all things considered, you're right. The behaviour has been good, especially considering the amounts of beer involved.

However I heard an English copper say on Five Live not long after it had happened that 100 or so England 'fans' had been rounded up and arrested for racially abusing and then kicking off with the Tunisians. It's not quite as rosy as you say.

[communistworkethic]

no,I'm not saying it is all rosy, but out of an estimated 250,000 english fans who have been there, for there to have been around 500 arrested - for all manner of incident, it has to be considered a fair success . Plus the sheer volume of alcohol consumed would make you think that drink isn't actually the real problem just the mentality of the few idiots in the first place.