It was an infamous night in football.

More than 5,000 Dutch police officers had to be deployed to contain hundreds of Israeli fans embarking on a post-match rampage, tearing down Palestinian flags, assaulting Muslim taxi drivers and throwing innocent bystanders into a river.

The only problem with this account, supplied by West Midlands police in support of a highly sensitive decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from travelling to a match at Villa Park last November, is that this week an independent review by the chief inspector of constabulary, Andy Cooke, concluded that much of it is either exaggerated or flat wrong. (Dutch police told his inspectors that they deployed 1,200 officers, had reports regarding one flag and one taxi driver, and that a Maccabi fan was in fact thrown into a canal, seemingly by members of a pro-Palestinian group).

Though nobody disputes it was a violent night that might well have shaped police desire to ban Maccabi fans, at best they made a worryingly sloppy case for it, including references cribbed from an unreliable AI tool to a football match that did not actually exist. But perhaps most damaging is the finding that by publicly downplaying reports of locals plotting to attack the visitors, the force overstated the threat posed by the Israelis and understated that posed to them – an error with global consequences.

The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, who as a Muslim MP in Birmingham needs no lectures on the sensitivities, responded that by apparently trying to smooth community relations, the force had only made matters worse. Now the city faces a toxic row over so-called two-tier policing, reactivating both incendiary........

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