Holy cow, I must have missed the riot!!!!!
I was there, first thing we noticed was about 8 coppers running to the crowd watching the main screen. Being a nosey buggar, I went over to have a gander. The police, within about 30 seconds had arrested a few guys, and took them away. Looking at what was going on, all it was was the guys on the railings above the crowd had started to throw beer onto the people below, and some peope did like it it (obviously). It was nothing at all, and once the police arrested the four people, it calmed down, and the police took the guys away, put them in a van, and came back into the fan park thing. The coppers did nothing else after that but stand and watch everyone leave. Hardly the actions of police in a riot is it?
It was a few drunken people being stupid, and the police went in, dealt with it, arrested a few and things got back to normal. If the police hadn't have run straight past us, we wouldn't have known about it. The guys who watched the screen by the fort must be bemused, because they wouldn't have seen a thing.
Bearing in mind there was 10,000 people there, to have 4 or so people arrrested in as swift and clean way was quite good. A lot of people there were wasted. It wasn't as bad as you read in the papers.
I must say though, GMP were very good last night. I had to queue for an hour to get tickets, and the coppers I spoke to were really good. Spoke to a senior officer and he was dead keen on us just getting into the place because the ticket company ballsed up on their ticket collections, and they (GMP) were doing everything they could to get us in. Even inside, the police were really good, there, but not being too over bearing.
It was the first time it's been done, and they have a lot of work to do to make it work properly (ticket distribution, queues for beer, stewarding etc all need a lot of work), but it worked OK, having a sandy beach in front of a big screen is a great idea, and if you picked the right bar, you got served quickly. They also had a token system to speed up beer queues, which if staffed properly would work very well.
