Our man in France, Scott Wilson, reports on the latest Euro 2016 developments...

PRIOR to Saturday in Marseille, the least comfortable I’d ever felt covering England abroad was in Moscow. It is no coincidence.

Whereas football hooliganism in this country tends to be fuelled by alcohol and a sense of misplaced bravado, in Russia it is viewed as a grotesque form of sport.

And to the Russian ‘ultras’ who overran Marseille’s Vieux Port district on Saturday, taking on England was like competing in the World Cup final.

It was back in October 2007 that I ventured to Moscow, to watch Steve McClaren’s England suffer a 2-1 defeat in the Luzhniki Stadium that was ultimately crucial in their failure to make Euro 2008.

It was a far from pleasant experience. With around 2,000 England supporters present, Moscow was a distinctly unfriendly place, with few people willing to converse directly with an alien group that seemed to be viewed as ‘the enemy’ from the outset.

I distinctly remember walking into a shop to buy a bottle of water, and being yelled at in Russian by a man manically pointing towards the door.

The night of the game was worse, with the now-familiar gangs of black-clad hooligans patrolling the side-streets around the stadium.

As a journalist, I was safely in the ground three or four hours before kick-off, but I know of fans who were set upon as they walked to the stadium in the hour or so before the game, with the police stood by watching.

Russian domestic football is blighted by hooliganism and racism, and in many ways is comparable to the English game in the 1980s.

Indeed, the Russian hooligan groups look at the behaviour of English fans in much of the 1980s with a mixture of envy and respect.

They organise themselves into 'crews' to mimic the English gangs that ransacked Europe repeatedly three decades ago, and still regard England as the cradle of football violence.

That was the backdrop to Saturday’s indiscriminate trouble, with an estimated 300-or-so hardcore Russian ‘ultras’ embarking on a mission to prove some sort of point about the new hierarchy in their violent, distorted world.

In order to increase their chances of causing mayhem, gangs from rival clubs joined up for what they clearly perceived to be the common national good, with emblems from leading clubs Spartak Moscow, CSKA Moscow and Zenit St Petersburg on display.

For 51 weeks of the year, those groups fight against each other. For one week only, rivalries were put aside to take on the English.

A number are understood to have returned to Russia, seemingly satisfied that their job is done, but the fear is that having made their point once, they will be tempted to wreak further chaos when they have the chance to encounter England fans again in the next few days.