Raiders Hordes Geared Up for a Rampage

San Diego has been preoccupied with plans for the big invasion. This city, with one of the largest military populations in the United States, was the main embarkation point for the Vietnam war and this week saw the departure of thousands more troops for the Middle East.

But the invasion for which the city and police force is preparing is the one from just a few hundred miles to the north. And the invaders will be speaking with American accents and dressed as pirates.

Super Bowl XXXVII brings some of American football's most rumbunctious fans to the city although rumbunctious is perhaps a gentler world than security guards and police around the country might use. With their weird piratical outfits, their lavish tattoos and a home ground they like to refer to as the Black Hole, the Raiders fans have established a reputation for themselves almost as high profile as that of their players.

Last weekend, when the Raiders beat the Tennessee Titans in Oakland to qualify for Super Bowl, 55 fans were arrested. The San Diego police have already steadied themselves for action.

When the San Diego Chargers met the Raiders last month there were 120 arrests for brawling and drunkenness. In 1999, 150 fans from the same teams were arrested for a fight that is still remembered because the TV cameras caught a security man being lobbed through the air as though he was a football headed for a touchdown. The most memorable incident was in 1995 when, according to legend, a fan bit off the ear of a Chargers fan in a sports bar; and that was even before Mike Tyson and Hannibal Lecter had made auricular cuisine fashionable.

"They have a bit of a reputation," said Dave Cohen, spokesman for the San Diego police, "and we're to be very vigilant but we want people to have a good time. We're not allowing people with camera cases or binocular cases to bring them into the stadium so, no, cutlasses won't get in."

Talk of possible mayhem at Super Bowls is unusual. What was remarkable to an outsider at last year's event in New Orleans was how the two sets of fans - from the St Louis Rams and New England Patriots - mingled so cheerfully before and after the game. Late at night, with much booze on board, the fans were wandering round the French Quarter more interested in persuading young women to lift up their tops - a common Mardi Gras practice - than in taking lumps out of each other. It is hard to imagine fans of, say, Leeds and Chelsea, behaving for three successive alcohol-fuelled nights in Soho in quite the same brotherly fashion.

Fans from Oakland and Philadelphia have the heaviest reputations in the American football world. "But I don't think they rank with the worst of the [English] soccer fans," said Mark Purdy, a sports columnist with the San Jose Mercury News. When the Raiders franchise moved to Los Angeles in the 80s, he added, "they picked up a lot of fans who were thugs and gang members". That element has stayed with the team even when they moved back home to Oakland, overshadowing the traditional "blue-collar working stiffs" who had made up the bulk of their support.

The Raiders fans' reputation stems partly from their home territory. Visiting teams are said to be intimidated by entering the Black Hole, the sort of experience that Galatasaray fans like to give visiting English teams in Istanbul.

The Black Hole, according the Raiders Fan Club website, was invented by six people back in 1996 when as one of them, Robert Rivera, tells it, "We started as a group of guys who had a vision for a BLACKED OUT STADIUM (his capitals). Blacked out, as in everyone wearing black. We started with six and are now easily over 400 strong."

Once you join the Black Hole squad you have to wear black and stand up whenever the Raiders' defence is on the field. "Let's make this place a REAL BLACK HOLE that sucks visiting teams in and never lets them out," says Rivera, who adds: "The passionate fans will agree and the others need to be educated."

Jerry Rice, Oakland's star receiver, has been defending them this week. "I think we need to put away this perception that you have all bad Raider fans," he said. "You're going to have a few knuckleheads that are going to go out there and cause some madness. [But] The players draw a lot of inspiration from watching all those painted faces and everything that goes on in the stands."

Ticket allocation for Super Bowl conspires, as across the world, against the faithful. The finalists are each entitled to only 17.5% of the 67,500 available seats in the Qualcomm Stadium (you work it out) while other teams and the NFL get 60%to distribute between themselves. The San Diego Chargers get the remaining 5%.

What this means is the regular fans have to pay over the odds. Seats were this week being offered over the internet at $9,700 (about £5,900) apiece. The real scalpers are not wearing eyepatches. Nevertheless, the loudest noise is likely to be made by Raiders fans from Oakland, supplemented as they will be by all the old supporters from LA who will even now be clogging up the 405 freeway south.

In contrast, Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans have a fairly genteel reputation, although the animosity between the Raiders and the Buccaneers is more than an east coast-west coast rivalry. Close observers of last weekend's match with the Tennessee Titans for the American Conference title would have seen fans hanging a doll in effigy, the doll being Chucky from the horror movie Child's Play.

Chucky is the nickname - the manic look, apparently - of the Buccaneers coach Jon Gruden, who was until last year the Raiders coach. He may need to call on Sol Campbell to inquire how you handle being exposed to the fans whose love you spurned if he is to get through an afternoon where many worse things than hanging are done to Chucky dolls.

The Super Bowl is almost as much a showcase for singers, musicians and advertising copywriters as it is for quarterbacks and linebackers. Tomorrow's performers will include no less than Carlos Santana and Beyonce Knowles in the pre-game fun, the Dixie Chicks singing the national anthem and Celine Dion doing God Bless America. All that and still Shania Twain and No Doubt to come at half-time. Not a patch, of course, on the old Metropolitan police band that used to entertain Arsenal fans with renditions of This Is My Lovely Day, but these are recessionary times.

The whole occasion will be another display of how much greater a hold football has on the national psyche than, say, baseball. "American football passed baseball about 15 years ago because the people who run football have done a much better job of understanding the American mojo," said Purdy. And if the Raiders don't win, then the fans will want to crawl back into that old BLACK HOLE.

The Oakland Raiders have been fined $50,000 for violating the NFL's Super Bowl media policy. Several players and coaches either failed to turn up or left early from Wednesday's mandatory interview session.