Letter: Football thugs

Letter: Football thugs

Sir: Three cheers for Suzanne Moore's biting anti-hooligan article ("Forever In-ger-land", 16 June). A fourth cheer for you, for giving it front-page prominence in the Tuesday Review. And yet a fifth, for braving the fury of your soccer-loving readers and advocating the true, radical answer - withdrawal from the World Cup.

I would be even more radical and ban all confrontational sport, from boxing to the frontbench battles in Parliament. The notion that such sport is a beneficial sublimation of our innate warlike urges is itself an implicit condoning of those urges.

If we need to confront something, why cannot we take it out on the natural world in individual and team sports, from walking to white-water canoeing?

ALAN WALKDEN

Tideswell, Derbyshire