No away fans

[Jane]

How many hours were they there before being wankers?

[PeterWithesShin]

How many hours were they there before being wankers?

2 hours plus.

[SoccerHQ]

Does anyone know why WMP kept them in the car park?

I can imagine the plan was round them all up and then escort them to away section perhaps 15 minutes before kick off as we've seen in the past when likes of SHA have been escorted from Witton station.

To me it would've been better just to get them in the ground early (half 6) as european fans prefer making an event of the matchday compared to us shuffling in 5-10 minutes before kick off and deal with the troublemakers if they were arriving late.

Just treating all 2k as cattle isn't great at all. Even worse some groups have clearly got out of the pen and are just roaming around the stadium perimeter chucking stuff into the Holte so going to be issues after the game I fear.

[Des Little]

Legia fans in Upper DE and Trinity. Who’d have thought it?

Me, for one.

[Flamingo Lane]

Love the Villa.  Love watching the Villa.  Love foreign travel.  But the idea of going to an away tie in Europe holds absolutely zero interest to me, given all that it seemingly entails.

[PeterWithesShin]

No idea how true it is as i'm not searching X and translating everything in Polish to do with the game, but one post I did see was that they were advised to go to the coach park for ticket collection, and then kept there.

From everything i've seen, apart from some pyro and singing no issues of note started until the run up to kick off when WMP wasn't letting anyone out to go to the game.

[AV84]

Have a look in the match thread at the statement released by the club. Seems Legia only have themselves to blame.

[Jane]

I'm really not trying to argue about this, but there's a lot of blame being put on WMP and the club without knowing what the actual situation was.

[PeterWithesShin]

I haven't blamed the club, I said it reflects badly on us. And there's not much we can do about that. We're the host club.

[SoccerHQ]

Just seems odd to me, they were on the trains together with Villa fans being boisterous but nothing beyond that so if you can travel on public transport together then it's surely o.k for them to go 200 yards from Witton station and just enter the away end there and then.

WMP don't really have a great reputation from visiting fans up and down the country for policing our games.

[Jane]

And there's the statement.

[AV84]

Club statement lifted from the match thread.

Aston Villa Football Club can confirm that no away fans were allowed into Villa Park for this evening’s UEFA Europa Conference League fixture with Legia Warsaw on the advice of West Midlands Police following large-scale disorder outside the stadium caused by visiting supporters.

The UK safety authorities, UEFA and Aston Villa, communicated on November 2 that the ticket allocation for away fans for this fixture would be reduced to 1,002 on the advice of safety authorities as a result of previous large-scale disorder caused by Legia fans last month at AZ Alkmaar.

A number of Dutch police officers were injured during that disorder. As a consequence, UEFA banned Legia supporters from travelling to Mostar for their game against HŠK Zrinjski.

In spite of numerous requests for cooperation from Legia Warsaw concerning their travelling supporters, especially in the last two days, no assistance on the serious safety matter of away fans attending Villa Park was forthcoming from the visiting club. The club has repeatedly, including this morning, raised concerns in conjunction with UEFA and all the relevant authorities to Legia that ticketless away supporters were attempting to attend Villa Park.

Approximately an hour before kick-off, Legia fans engaged in planned and systematic violent acts against West Midlands Police officers and a decision was then made by West Midlands Police to exclude all Legia supporters.

Aston Villa strongly condemns the behaviour of those visiting supporters and would like to thank West Midlands Police for their professionalism in very difficult circumstances.

[PeterWithe]

Although what were Legia supposed to do about ticketless supporters?

Glad I didn’t take my kid now, it will be dickhead convention after the game. If this is the scrupulous planning talked about pre-game, I’d hate to see what chaos looks like.

[pauliewalnuts]

Footage on twitter of them kicking off in the city centre pre-match.

[PeterWithesShin]

And yes, I do blame WMP. Same as I blame the Spanish police for what we endured in Madrid back in the day. I also have said many times that Legia have an element that are absolute twats.

However i'm really not sure that the best course of policing to try and diffuse any potential issues is kettle them for hours in a car park on a freezing cold night and then not let them go to the ground, and then ban them completely from entering the ground.