The newspaper headlines were much as expected, with The Sun's "Scum" being the prime sample of media outrage at the goings on at Upton Park on Tuesday night. That a man was stabbed in the chest reflected a seriousness to the situation, so too the tears of Jack Collison as he left the field at the end of West Ham's extra-time win over Millwall.

Collison bravely decided to play in the match after losing his father to a motorcycle accident on Sunday, the day after Hammers defender Calum Davenport had suffered a knife attack that seems likely to end his footballing career. West Ham, a troubled place as it is, could really have done without the embarassment brought to their club by the actions of a section of knuckle-dragging fans during, before and after their Carling Cup match with Millwall.

Once the two teams were pulled from the hat for a second round tie many had predicted trouble between two sets of rival fans who have a long-running emnity and, to adopt the tiresome vernacular of the hooligan, have not had the chance for a "tear up" since 2005. This one was always likely to "go off" and while certain media wail and gnash teeth about what happened, questions must be asked over what has made the ructions of Tuesday night acceptable to a sizeable minority of idiots.

The likes of Sun journalist Shaun Custis have decried the incidents as "back to the seventies", the era when hooliganism began to blight the English game, yet this would seem to suggest that football violence is a thing of the past. It is not, though it is an accepted view that those who continue with hooligan "firms" do so at sites away from the ground. Indeed, many of the active hooligans no longer even attend matches, either by virtue of banning orders, finance or a disinterest in the game itself.

The most striking thing about Tuesday's violence was that much of it took place in the ground. All-seater stadia and the gentrification of football have played their part in abating the whiff of pitchside sulphur. Football remains part of a society that can hardly be said to have become less violent since the "English disease" and its effects began to wear off at the end of the 80s. Though, that said, the skirmishes in the ground seemed to centre around West Ham fans showing off rather than any old-style charge at opposition fans.

Cheap tickets for a lower category game, a return of some of the old school of thugs and a group of ill-advised youngsters wanting to show off to the former "top boys" have been labelled as possible factors behind the trouble. Other observers have blamed the police's event management with roads blocked off and a subsequent failure to delay the kick-off when fans were struggling to get into the ground on time.

Definitely to blame were those who chose to invade the pitch yet to watch this not particularly angry mob cavort and prance on to the hallowed Boleyn Ground pitch was not to catch a sight of fear but instead mockery and perhaps a little pity. There seemed to be little aggression towards the players or even rival fans from those who made it on to the grass. Indeed, few could feel threatened by this ragged selection of distended bare bellies, teenagers in cheap sportsgear and one angry-looking lady with a handbag.

The activities of this rabble have been labelled by one friend of the site as "cultural tourism", in that those who took part were attempting to emulate tales of yore. It is this fetishism towards the old ways that are surely a leading factor behind the antics at West Ham.

Films like "Green Street", based ludicrously around an American joining a Hammers' "firm", and "The Football Factory", starring mockney godhead Danny Dyer, have given hooliganism a Hollywood hue and air of acceptability. So too the truly horrible documentary series "the Real Football Factories" which features the aforementioned Dyer, drawing deep on a cigarette and swigging a pint of lager while he meets "firms" from around the world while hailing them, in a broad East End accent, for behaviour that is "pwopah naughty" (the hooligan must always have a speech impediment).

There are also the libraries full of hooligan books, penned by dunderheads and full of turgid prose bragging about ends being taken, rivals being "mugged off" and other firms being "mob handed" yet still "run".

To the young, impressionable or terminally dull-witted, such material glorifies violence and makes it attractive.

And, while Sky Sports News were reporting the incidents at Upton Park on Tuesday they cut away to adverts for new film "The Firm", a sheened-up remake of the Allan Clarke classic that exposed the existential crisis of the 80's casual hooligan. Clarke's film was attempting to show the pointlessness of football violence, the remake's trailer looks like another glamming-up job guaranteed to turn weak minds.

The media has been quick, as ever, to condemn, yet with the other hand it is galvanising the very same sub-culture centred around violence and aggression that it expresses such outrage towards.