Here’s a sentence I never expected to write on a sports blog: The Balkan conflict is now being fought with chairs in Australia.

One girl sustained minor injuries in this barrage of chair-throwing between Serbian and Bosnian fans after Serbia’s Novak Djokovic’s defeated Amer Delic in four sets, and I’m gonna go ahead and assume Delic is Bosnian.  And this incident happened just two days after Serbs clashed with Croatian fans in and around Melbourne Park.

The whole notion of people fighting at a tennis match is a little much for me to grasp.  Any sport where the P.A. announcer has to ask for quiet doesn’t deserve hooligans.

[The Sporting Blog]

While pussy-ass English hoolies are limiting themselves to boring old fist-fighting, Serbian hooligans take that extra step towards terrorism and organized crime, as they do things like vandalize their own players’ cars to intimidate them and shove road flares down police officers’ throats.

Uros Misic, 20, assaulted a plain-clothes police officer during Red Star’s home game with Hajduk Kula and was tried for attempted murder by the Belgrade District Court. He inflicted multiple burns on Nebojsa Trajkovic and then tried to force it into his throat, after which the policeman fired gunshots into the air in self-defence…

“This kind of violence has become an epidemic and the legal bodies have to respond appropriately because common citizens can expect no protection if we allow villains to carry out bestial acts against the police,” judge Lazovic said.

Let’s keep in mind that that’s ten years in Serbian prison.  Serbia’s not a happy place. I don’t have too many rules of thumb, but one of them is, “When visiting former Soviet bloc countries torn apart by ethnic divisions and genocidal civil war, try to stay out of prison.”

Police in Germany organized a soccer match to promote its anti-hooliganism stance, and in a million years you'll never guess how it ended.

A football match organised to promote non violence among fans in Germany ended in a mass punch-up.  Five fans were arrested at the game which was staged in Aachen as part of a police campaign against hooliganism.  The violence started when five young players attacked a heckler who was kicked and punched to the ground, and then other players and fans waded in.

Shocking, I know.  But this is further proof that nothing spices up a boring peace protest like violence.  I happen to prefer hippies getting beaten with nightsticks, but I guess a soccer brawl is okay, too.  As long as some bottles were thrown.  Tell me someone got hit with a bottle.

Here's footage of a pleasant game of soccer in Turkey, between Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe.  Apparently the teams are rivals or something, and an American teacher was at the scene in Galatasaray's stadium.

As the teams warmed, people started throwing chairs at the opposite team’s players! I’m serious – they were kicking the stadium chairs loose and hurling them wholesale or in pieces onto the field. And then they pulled out smoke bombs and flares, and started throwing those! … [T]he game hadn’t even started yet…

The game began, and people continued to throw seats, water bottles, and flares onto the field, where they were left as hazards at the players’ feet… Then Fenerbahçe scored, and the stadium really erupted into craziness… Dozens of police officers stood watching in all corners of the field, moving to shield the players whenever they could…

[W]hen Fenerbahçe scored again… so many flares were thrown onto the field that you literally could not see from one side of the stadium to the other. It looked like a war scene in a movie.

Ah, good times.  The Offside has video of the players ignoring the bottles getting hurled at them, if you're into that sort of thing.  I know I am.

In other soccer-related goodness, Dave's Football Blog looks at why soccer fans are so violent, while fans of violent sports like rugby and football are more generally good-natured.  Also, Greek police will use paintball snipers to deter and mark hooligans attending the UEFA Champions League Final between Liverpool and AC Milan.  If it produces video like this, then I'm all for it.

As we all know by now, international soccer fans are dangerous people, not to be trusted. If the news stories are true, all they do is riot and kill people and set off flares and hurl bottles at coaches. But Chelsea's fans may be the worst offenders of all.

Chelsea have banned three of their fans after they were caught throwing celery during the team's FA Cup win at Tottenham Hotspur… Chelsea had warned their fans three days before the replay against throwing celery during matches, saying it was a criminal offence and that anyone caught could be banned.

The unlikely warning had followed referee reports which mentioned celery-throwing at two previous Chelsea matches and which were being investigated by the Football Association.

I know I don't speak British, so help me out here: is "celery" something different in the U.K.? Like, is a celery a spiked iron ball or flaming garbage or a poisonous snake? Because in America it's a lightweight vegetable that's pretty much useless without peanut butter and raisins.

I spoke to Chelsea fan Unsilent Majority of KSK, who confirms that celery in England, while still a vegetable, has different uses. It comes from a song sung at Chelsea home matches:

Celery, Celery / If she don't come / I'll tickle her bum / With a lump of celery.

Hey, don't knock it 'til you've tried it. Want more information? You can read the book. Me, I'm gonna pretend this girl is a Chelsea fan.

Just another love story about fans and the projectiles they hurl. Sevilla coach Juande Ramos stepped out onto the field to celebrate his team's go-ahead goal early in the second half of a match against rival Betis, and was promptly knocked unconscious by a two-liter bottle filled with ice and liquid. Man, soccer fans are the classiest. NBX was nice enough to find the video:

Ramos was unconscious for about ten minutes, and the game was suspended and may not be completed. But the coach was level-headed about the incident:

"These are things which happen when matches get heated," he told reporters as he left the hospital on Thursday. "Betis fans aren't represented by the lunatic who threw the bottle."

I gotta disagree with ya there Johnny. Fans pelted your ambulance with rocks, so… yeah. That "lunatic" was a pretty fucking good representative.