And Blackburn Rovers supporters were involved in violence which prompted the cancellation of Sunday's friendly against NEC Nijmegen. Police and local authorities in the Dutch city called the contest off after intelligence emerged via social networking sites suggesting there would be a repeat of unsavoury scenes involving Rovers fans in Holland over the previous two evenings.
There were clashes in Deventer on Friday night after Steve Kean's men went down 4-2 to Go Ahead Eagles and incidents with Blackburn and NEC followers occurred in Nijmegen on Saturday.
Rovers' operations director Paul Agnew: "We always take advice off the police and authorities, who have a much better handle on these things and report back to us.
"We've never put the blinkers on for this sort of thing. If something official came back then obviously we would act accordingly.
"It's something new to us. We've been in the UEFA Cup four times in the last 10 years and never had any problems before.
"We've got a very good record of fans travelling abroad. It's a great shame because a number of our fans will have paid money and taken time to come to these games over the weekend and I feel very sorry for them.
"I was at the game on Friday and we heard there'd been a minor, minor disturbance between the two sets of fans.
"On the back of that the authorities, including the police, decided to have a meeting ahead of this game at NEC.
"They had intelligence overnight on the Saturday to suggest there'd been some social networking messages both ways (and) that there could be potential violence."
Source: FOOTYMAD
