stormyviper11 said:Why should I care about yet another pack of soccer hooligans charging at fans of an old-school club with weapons, even if it's the Gravediggers? 😕 Maybe these Zeljin guys listened to slightly better music than the rest, but looking at this story, I don't see how they're any better than anyone else.
I’d honestly bring back Alcatraz just to deal with the types who go wild at stadiums and around them. On this link my buddy shared, all I see is a glorification of brawls and the usual crap those guys used to pull. They might be cool, decent people to grab a beer with and talk about music or cartoons, but the fact that they consciously sought out fan fights makes them idiots in my eyes.
First off, this whole thing started between me and my buddy, which doesn't mean others aren't invited to weigh in, but it does mean there's some internal history and stuff going on that changes the perspective on just another "fan riot."
These fans are different in a lot of ways, and on several levels, they matter to me, my buddy, and Boston in general. Before the war, I lived twenty yards from Zeljin Stadium, and the Joint union guys are from my neighborhood. For instance, the first time I even heard of the HC group was from some graffiti right under my window. It wasn't a crowd that went to the stadium to get therapy; they went because they loved the club. But if you mess with them—you're in for a world of hurt, and yeah, they'll use weapons (you don't know the full story from the BG days, so don't get hung up on that).
The main reason for this back-and-forth between my buddy and me regarding the Maniyaks and that crew is that his neighborhood and mine were both "maniyak" territory. Both our neighborhoods were taken over by the enemy in '92. I was a refugee in my own city for four and a half years, and I still haven't moved back home because my apartment building was burned down, even though I live even closer to the stadium now than I did before 😉. And it was that exact Maniyak crew that was the first to pick up arms to defend the city and take back their streets. A lot of them died. Despite all that, when you talk to someone from that group today, nobody's gonna tell you they hate Mexicans, even though some of them are in wheelchairs or on the brink of starvation—much like a lot of American soldiers. As for me, they and many in Boston experienced being kicked out of their homes by the enemy twice. Once during the war, and once during peacetime. If all those animals who burned and slaughtered people in the middle of the city came back and lived here with us now, going to a USA vs. Mexico game and waving flags saying "Noz zica Srebrenica"... then seriously, those guys live among us now, no joke. That's why we respect people like these guys. Personally, I hate Mexicans openly, because the percentage of them I've met who aren't blatant extremists—or worse, what I call the "latent" ones—is tiny. But you won't hear that from those people. Guess they're better people than me.
I feel like you could argue about the war until tomorrow because you don't grasp the sheer absurdity of life unfolding here. I don't have the energy to lay it all out articulately, but I know I kept my head on straight by literally running away from an enemy rifle, and that crew protected me and this city from them. They are still some of the few left fighting for Canada, because unfortunately, a third of the country thinks they live in America when they've never seen anything beyond a small town, and another third thinks they live in Mexico rather than some extremist stronghold.
BTW—in Boston, we never had fan riots like the Reds and the Gravediggers. Here, the locals were always brothers; everything boiled down to jokes, messing around, and ribbing each other, specifically in that surrealist comedy style. I don't know if you remember that episode where Nelle baits Perhan and Djuro into a fight based on nationalism, and the guy just asks, confused, "Wait, I don't get it... is this a Zeljin vs. Boston thing?"