Fayçal, one of the bus drivers responsible for taking the supporters to the Vélodrome stadium, told Progrès about the terrible events before the Marseille-Lyon clash on Sunday evening.
This was a high risk ranked match. However, for the first time since 2015, Lyon supporters were authorized to go to the Vélodrome to watch the Olympico between Marseille and Lyon. A match ultimately postponed due to serious incidents which took place before the match. In addition to the players’ bus – where Fabio Grosso and his assistant Raffaele Longo were injured – three buses of OL supporters were stoned when arriving near the Marseille enclosure.
As explained by RMC Sport on Sunday evening, a group of around a hundred people, all with hooded faces, attacked a bus at the head of the line with paving stones and smoke bombs, escorted by two CRS trucks. Several people were injured. In the midst of this chaos, Faisal experienced a distressing evening. Used to driving Lyon supporters to OL matches all over France, the bus driver told Progress the events ahead of the Olympico.
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“The action was carried out by people wearing hoods and OM scarves”
Having left Bron around 1 p.m. and arriving near the Vélodrome six hours later, Fayçal remembers the “good atmosphere” before arriving in Marseille. Before everything goes wrong. “In each bus, there is a supporter manager who manages it. At the Lançon toll booth, we were escorted by an armada of CRS and gendarmes (…) It was by radio that we learned that the bus players had been stoned. The police ordered us to stop the bus. We waited a little less than an hour, and when we finally got back to the stadium, that was the beginning of the stone-throwing of the first of the four buses leaving from the Rhône-Alpes region.”
According to the bus driver, “the action was carried out by people wearing hoods and OM and South Winners scarves”. “My window on the driver’s side was shattered. We were able to go to the underground car parks reserved for supporters. There, we no longer feared anything. The supporters went up to the stands. Members of the Professional Football League came to take photos, and at 10 p.m., I was still waiting to know when I was going to be able to bring ‘my’ supporters home.”
For their part, the Lyon players left in a substitute bus, the official bus not having been sufficiently secured.