A flare for the old ultra-violence

(Video courtesy EuroSoccer Blog)

The above video was from yesterday's UEFA Champions League soccer tournament game in between Italian Rivals AC Milan and Inter Milan. Which is a big soccer rivalry. Try to imagine a scenario in which Duke and North Carolina were forced to share a basketball arena, that's AC and Inter.

What happened to trigger this? AC Milan was up 1-0 in the game and 3-0 in the aggregate (in Euro soccer, they play home-and-home and take the total goals of both games) when Inter finally scored. Or so the Inter fans thought. The goal was disallowed (for reasons I don't understand, I don't follow soccer) and that's when the Inter fans let loose with the flares, and AC Milan's goalkeeper Dida got nailed.

Why did stadium security let *any* combustible material in there in the first place, especially after the Madrid train bombing. How do they know that road flare's not going to be used to light something more explosive? Or that the "road flare" is really a road flare and not a bomb? There are al-Qaeda people out there seeing this and thinking they can get their ricin bombs into the stadium if they disguise them as road flares.

Heck, 9/11 pretty much ended the practice of tortilla-throwing at Texas Tech and tortillas don't explode.

What makes the whole thing worse than the fact that combustible material was thrown onto a field during a game, was that a player was hit. Thankfully, it was a road flare and Dida only suffered burns. What if that "road flare" had explosives in it?

I know we've had our moments as American sports fans (most recently "The Brawl at Auburn Hills") but Euro soccer fan has a longer track record of this, and once again they have shown the ability to one-up (one-down?) the competition.

Tomorrow: Age Limits.