“We were shocked by the scenes of mayhem in central London and outside Wembley on Sunday evening,” a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police told reporters.
“How were we to know that large groups of football fans, who had been drinking solidly since early morning, might turn rowdy after England lost and take out their rage on opposition supporters? We are not clairvoyants.
“And how were we to know that mobs of chavs without match tickets might decide to swarm past security into Wembley stadium?
"I stress that the Met’s policy is to send large numbers of officers only to locations where we predict there will be disorder. And our officers told us that they didn’t expect any disorder in London on match day - on the grounds that they all wanted to sit and watch the game at home rather than to battle hundreds of drunken, angry thugs on a rainy Sunday evening.
“The Met finds it far easier in these dreadful cases to wait until all the trouble has died down and afterwards to issue pious lectures to the general public.
“However, all of us in the police have to accept that we, like Mr Southgate and his squad, have found our limits. From now on, we will give up any attempt to keep order at mass events or to stop central London from descending into anarchy. Instead, we will concentrate on the kind of thing we did so well during the lockdowns, such as arresting grieving women attending a vigil on Clapham Common.”