All three sides will enter the international spectacle in France among a handful of teams that will be considered potential contenders for the title, so we are expecting a thorough test throughout the campaign.” Prince Charles (attractive wife, lots of money), Don Johnson (star of Miami Vice, cars, pretty girls, expensive clothes, money), Rod Stewart and Peter Stringfellow (for the same reasons). A similar pen portrait from The Times for 22 July 1981, of an 18-year-old east London skinhead called John O’Leary, mentions his habit of drinking lager from the can in the very first line. When England football fans returned home after an outbreak of violence at a match in Copenhagen in September 1982 journalists felt the need to mention that they arrived at Heathrow ‘drinking lager from cans’. Lager’s symbolism had become potent, the mere word a shortcut for a certain type of troubled, troublesome youth. The ACPO report itself wasn’t made public – they thought a list of towns where violence was a regular occurrence and the police were struggling might act as a kind of catalogue for mobile yobs – so we can’t know if it mentioned lager. Certainly the attendant newspaper coverage based on the press release does not seem to have flagged lager as a particular problem, and wine, as in wine bars, got mentioned more often. They must take a lot of blame for the promotion of lager and its violent consequences… My argument is not with lager itself, but with the big boys who are marketing ruthlessly to the wrong people… You can make even more [money] if you convince boys that drinking 10 pints makes them even more macho, but this results in the violence we have seen in the shires.

We are on course in terms of finalising our planning for the season and we are excited about returning to the training field,” added the Springbok coach. But this moment passed. Woking, one of the towns worst hit by town centre mass scrapping during 1987, declared the problem solved in early 1989. At the same time lager’s image began to change in line with a general cultural shift which saw the first wave of ‘new man’-ism – only subtly sexist and knowing his way round an omelette pan – give way to the hairy-chested, unrepentant machismo of the 1970s. Instead of the Scandinavia of walnut coffee tables and Ibsen, lager adopted Viking imagery — Hagar the Horrible for Skol, Norseman from Vaux. Others were the kind of town centre scuffles that have been happening since long before lager came on the scene, and will probably continue for as long as young men get bored, drunk and randy. It is the image of lager, exuding its message, ‘Stay young; stay with the herd’, which is so malign. It is the content and colour of the product which allows it to be used this way – uniformly banal in taste and texture, and brewed as a lowest common denominator mass product. But then herds are all given the same feed… When the lager lad says that beer is an old man’s drink, the reply is to ask if they have ever thought of growing up?… Lager is a candle to the moth for these people. It lubricates the louts as they lurch to the football terraces…We respect the time beer needs to be produced, developing little by little inside the tanks. You just can’t rush craftsmanship, and that's why our traditional brewing processes can take up to 8 weeks. We obsess over flavour and aroma, and therefore we fight the quantities of mega production and economies of scale. The arrival of the police, the observers noted, was sometimes greeted with cheers from crowds simply excited that something was happening. Reflecting on moral panics and the need for scapegoats in government and the media as we worked on this piece we got an uneasy feeling. Surely craft beer will get its turn in the doghouse, won’t it? There is, after all, a cycle new beer styles or market segments seem to go through: And when Watney’s launched UK-brewed draught Foster’s in 1982 the attendant advertising campaign was fronted by comedian Paul Hogan, swaggering and frank, in T-shirt and jeans — the ultimate Australian male. Let us be clear what we are referring to. We’re talking about gangs of hundreds of drunken white youths, often wielding knives and machetes, rampaging through otherwise peaceful towns and deliberately seeking battle with the police.

the lager lout phenomenon did, over time,work in CAMRA’s favour in that it provided an opportunity for usto make a clear distinction between the discerning cask ale drinker in the pub environment versus the loutish ‘down-market’ behaviour of those fuelled by strong, cheap lagers.In the following decade, though lager’s share of the market continued to rise (4 per cent in 1968, 10 per cent in 1971, 20 per cent by 1975), competition grew with it. More brands emerged – genuine imports, foreign brands brewed under licence in the UK (Carlsberg, Holsten), and home-grown ‘faux’ lagers such as Greenall Whitley’s Grünhalle. And of course others with their own agendas leapt on the bandwagon. Anti-drink campaigners, for example, saw an opportunity to protest newly extended pub opening hours, to call for tighter restrictions on pubs, and to argue for regulation of alcohol advertising.

Television presenter Robert Kilroy-Silk, formerly a Labour MP on Merseyside, captured the hysteria when in August 1987 he wrote a rather hysterical op-ed for the Times entitled‘Riots That Go Unremarked’:At 12.15 am there was a loud noise and shouting coming from the Hamlet Road direction, and people ran from the Chinese towards the noise… As we rounded the corner into Hamlet Road we were confronted with a group of approximately 200 people moving towards us… The group walked up to the Chinese take-away and re-gathered outside the Job Centre. At this point the large police van arrived… The mass divided into smaller group and some made their way home. Two remaining large groups were herded towards the Wimpy and the Pightle, with one police officer on each side of the road, walking slowly behind them. This took another 15 minutes, and involved a lot of jeering and baiting of the police officers.

The hysteria in the papers died down and the police moved on to fretting over ecstasy and illegal raves, and then alco-pops, and then happy-slapping and then… South Africa will launch their Rugby World Cup title defence on Sunday, 10 September, against Scotland in Marseille, which will be followed by pool matches against Romania in Bordeaux (17 September), Ireland in Paris (23 September) and Tonga in Marseille (1 October).

Our Styles

John Foreman is a postman and, on the face of it, not much to write home about. He is light, slight, with neat blond hair and a downy moustache. He seems meek — and each Saturday afternoon on the streets of some football town, he inherits the earth… In his terrace tribe there is a ritual and a sort of code. Each ‘good day out’ follows a similar pattern; invariably the violence is fuelled by a mixture of lager and cider. Fist fights are acceptable, knife fights are not. Lager. Lager was to blame. A type of beer that had arrived in earnest in Britain only thirty years before as the upmarket, sophisticated, sharp-suited Continental cousin of the traditional pint of wallop. These Castle Lager Rugby Championship matches are going to be crucial as we look to get our Rugby World Cup season off to a good start and playing against New Zealand away and Australia and Argentina on the highveld will be ideal for our preparation.