Crack down time

Most supporters attending the game on Sunday won't have been aware that a large group of so called West Ham fans were keeping the local plod very busy down the Tottenham High Road.

These supporters were determined to cause trouble and the nearer the ground they got the angrier they seemed to get - eventually trying to storm a local pub even though it being so close to kick-off it was empty. The Tottenham mob was busily trying to stir things up from the other side of the road.

As far as I could see from the safe distance I was keeping the police escorted the West Ham plankton into the ground.

You could reasonably ask how is it that West Ham allowed these people to buy tickets from them?

I don't know why the police simply could not have arrested the lot and had them banned from all future football matches for life. Unless such seemingly draconian action is taken now I can only see football violence getting worse.

The majority of decent fans have a right to go to and watch football in peace and be left to enjoy matches such as the thrilling one I saw at White Hart Lane.

Regrettably, the football authorities are quite happy for incidents such as those at Tottenham on Sunday to be ignored and, when they happen inside the ground as happened at the recent Watford versus Luton game, they tell us that this was an isolated occurrence.

In this case there were clearly not enough coppers inside the ground and the reason was simple - the home club have to pay for them. As if this isn't bad enough the clubs don't have to pay a penny for policing outside the stadiums.

Given the real problems we now have with football violence I would make the home and away team pay for policing outside London derbies then clubs might take a bit more responsibility about who they sell tickets to.

The FA now have a chance to crack down hard on the hooligans and clubs like Birmingham who give the impression of tolerating them. They had better not pretend there isn't a problem.

Wenger whinge over Henry will not fool the FA

David Beckham deserves a better press than he's getting at the moment.

There is no way that his little nudge on Lee Bowyer could be compared with Roy Keane's premeditated assault on Jason McAteer. Both players were making a genuine attempt to win the ball - though Beckham's arm may have been a little high. But what do you expect when you have Bowyer breathing down your neck?

The referee was in a perfect position to see the incident and rightly gave only a foul.

He would have taken into consideration the record of the players involved in the incident and, anyway, who in their right mind would want to book the England captain for giving Bowyer a bloody nose?

Arsene Wenger clearly doesn't agree with me because he has used the Beckham incident to whinge about the FA charging Thierry Henry for an incident that the ref didn't see.

Wenger isn't daft. He knows that his complaint is just a smoke screen to protect his best player and get people talking about the FA rules rather than the incident itself.

The FA aren't daft either and my bet is that Henry won't escape punishment.

Dodgy keeper's thrown by rules

Aston Villa manager Graham Taylor must now be the odds-on favourite to become the first Premiership manager to be sacked. Losing to a second-rate Birmingham City was bad enough, but he hasn't even taught his players the rules of the game.

Every schoolboy knows that you can't score direct from a throw-in but the Villa goalkeeper Peter Enckelman obviously didn't. He should have just let the throw from his defender Olof Mellberg dribble into the empty net. Instead he panicked and it looked like he touched the ball.

Villa's cause wasn't helped by Mellberg's pre-match comments that he hadn't heard of any of the Blues players, which just motivated Birmingham even more.

That's rich. Prior to last night, Mellberg's main claim to fame was his fight with Swedish team-mate Freddie Ljungberg during training for the World Cup.

Bank on Tony to look after the fans

It's good to see that Chelsea fanatic Tony Banks is standing to be London Mayor.

I hope he wins because it will be good to see a politician who is a genuine football fan in the top job. Banks would be just the man to sort out Wembley and help clubs like Arsenal who want to move to bigger grounds.

One thing that surely wouldn't happen if Banksy got the job, would be allowing Tottenham High Road to be dug up on the Sunday of a London derby.

Why we're a bunch of losers

I don't play tennis much because I can't stand the snobbishness of the game in England.

I do have a friend, though, who plays regularly and belongs to a local club in London. He recently travelled abroad, went to the local club for a game and was welcomed with open arms. This was a big surprise.

"If a stranger came to try to play at my club, he would be told to get lost," was his comment to me.

Is it any wonder then that with Greg Rusedski, who isn't even British anyway, out of the Davis Cup, and Tim Henman nursing a shoulder injury we will be playing some no-hopers against Thailand?

And what on earth are we doing playing Thailand anyway? Because we lost to Sweden in the last round.

British tennis has now become almost as embarrassing as Scottish football.

Have you ever heard of Miles MacLagan? Well he is standing by to play if Henman isn't fit and though he sounds Scottish, he was actually born in Zambia. Martin Lee, ranked 122 in the world, is also in the team, along with Arvind Parmar, who bowed out with a whimper to No14 seed Thomas Enqvist of Sweden at Wimbledon.

Every year we are told during the Wimbledon Championship about what is being done for grass-roots tennis and every year things get worse. Tennis is a great game to play and watch, but here in Britain it is run by a bunch of second-raters which is why we have second-rate players.