Police: Violence is likely at Elland Road

By: Matthew | November 14th, 2007

Leeds aren’t exactly renowned for well-behaved fans, so when the Police go out of their way to warn Elland Road that there’s a serious potential for crowd violence, it’s probably a big deal. Playing Huddersfield Town later this month will be a massive local derby, with tiny Huddersfield taking on huge Leeds, and the police reckon that fans on both sides are likely to be gearing up for a battle if the result doesn’t go their way.

Leeds and Huddersfield have already agreed to move the kick-off up to 12:15pm, so that fans will leave the stadium during daylight, but a Leeds proposal to reduce Huddersfield’s ticket allocation to 1,712 - in order to create a buffer zone of empty seats between fans of the two teams - has been flatly rejected. Leeds have now applied to the FA for an exemption to regulations that normally require Leeds to provide at least 2,000 tickets for away supporters.

This, though, isn’t going down well in Huddersfield. At all. Huddersfield Town chairman Ken Davy is livid that Elland Road, with a 39,000 person capacity, will only have 1,712 away fans. On the one hand, I can’t agree with him: there’s a serious potential for violence and anything that helps the police contain it is a good thing. On the other hand, in the interests of fairness, why not take the seats for the buffer zone away from Leeds fans? The stadium hasn’t been filled to capacity all season - usually hovering around 30,000 - and surely it wouldn’t be that difficult to seperate the fans with home seats rather than away ones.

Anyway: we’ll deal with Huddersfield when we play them. Here’s to a safe and peaceful match against Swindon this weekend.