Football ‘hooligans’ on rampage in Skipton (From Craven Herald)

Football ‘hooligans’ on rampage in Skipton

8:00am Friday 5th October 2012 in News

“Come an’ ‘av a go if ya think yar‘ard enough” rang out on the terraced streets of Skipton as the town became a stage for a clash between rival football fans.

Sleepy Skipton may be 25 miles away from the nearest big city football team, but it had been chosen by Norwegian film makers as an ideal location to depict a bout of soccer hooliganism - seemingly the Scandinavian country has escaped the phenomenon.

The Oslo-based film agency, Dinamo, chose the town to stage a confrontation between opposing fans.

And it was all to promote the country’s popular football pools, much of it focused on the English Premier League.

The film crew and the cast assembled in Dawson Street last Wednesday to film the encounter between the blues and the reds, much of it shot under the quarry railway line bridge.

In charge was the company’s client director, Eric Loe, who said Skipton had been chosen because it was a setting Norwegian people could relate to and the team had come to Britain because of the hooligan factor. “That is what some people think of Britain - if they like it or not,” he said.

But he stressed the commercial would not be what people expected because there was no violence involved.

“What we have is two gangs meeting but instead of a physical clash they have a clash of minds.

“People will see a group that they assume are hooligans but when they meet there is no fight but instead a conversation.

“They find they have an interest in statistics and start to talk about goal average and other facts,” he said.