Enough of this '80s revival

London - Coming home late tonight I rubbed my eyes in semi-disbelief at the news from Upton Park. Having worried swine flu would claim me after three colleagues had succumbed, I thought I was hallucinating when I saw the English disease had broken out again in the year 16*.

Last night the BBC showed First Blood, in which Sly Stallone plays a veteran plagued by flashbacks. I know how he feels. I thought I had slipped through a 24-year timewarp to the night Millwall hooligans ran amok at Luton and drove the police back under a hail of seats. A penny for the thoughts of Jonathan Spector, who went the distance for the Hammers tonight, or Millwall's chairman - a real Vietnam vet in ex-marine John G. Berylson. The Lions' US connections extend to ex-players John Kerr, Kasey Keller, Bruce Murray and now the wantaway Scouse-Texan Zak Whitbread.

Millwall & West Ham have history. As a child of the '70s I would place them both in the first division of misbehaving Football League fans along with Cardiff, Chelsea, Leeds, Liverpool, Portsmouth & Tottenham. The lions of Millwall have been the top dogs of hooliganism for at least half a century but after the police threatened to sue them in 2002, the club has done all it can to get rid of its oiks with banning orders, membership schemes and community work. But clearly there are still enough yobs prepared to throw fists in that team's name. They might not be rock-hard dockers anymore, but the tradition of violence keeps being handed down the generations.

Tonight's skirmishes were in one sense a blast from the past but rather a reminder that English football grew up too quickly in the 1990s. Neanderthal fan fisticuffs seem suddenly out of place in the foreign-dominated Premier League and the globalised host city of the 2012 Olympic Games. How quickly we forget Lord of the Flies was right - civilisation is a mask that can slip off in flash. I had almost forgotten years of being escorted by mounted police to decrepit grounds where I was caged in for 90 minutes and locked in for an hour afterwards before another police convoy marched me back to the station and made sure no rival fans boarded my train home.

I have no time for the tedious trail of English hooligan memoirs, although Colin Ward's 'Steaming in', which records the often hilarious adventures of an Arsenal troublemaker in the late '70s and early '80s, was a gem of the genre.

Less good are the often laughable hooligan movies, which began with a BBC TV movie called 'The Firm' in 1988 (a loose remake hits cinemas next month), but one line from that sticks in my mind - Gary Oldman's character watches an academic try to explain hooliganism in sociological terms and he reacts-

'Why don't he say we just like hitting people?'

*16 years since Rupert Murdoch' Sky Sports gave birth to the new football and erased 105 years of soccer history by only quoting 'Premier League records'.

- Sean O'Conor