This weekend, we have seen some disgraceful scenes on football pitches in England’s top two divisions and in Scotland too.

Aston Villa captain Jack Grealish was punched in the head by a Birmingham City supporter, who has since been jailed for 14 weeks and banned by the club for life.

It’s just disgusting, it really is.

We’ve talked about how things have ultimately improved across the decade, but if that’s still happening, then we have a problem.

This was an issue and was commonplace across the 1970s and 80s with hooliganism but to see something like that is absolutely astonishing.

I didn’t see the game live but I did see footage of the incident on social media afterwards.

Peoples’ reactions were exactly how they should be – he should be banned for life and it was assault.

If someone did that in the street then it would be a court appearance and a judge or a magistrate would probably given them a prison sentence, which is what we saw when the thug was jailed on Monday, almost straight away.

It’s only a football game and his actions were absolutely abhorrent and you have to give plenty of credit to Grealish too for not reacting.

Also, in his post-match interview – after he scored the winner and celebrated with the fans and a steward was taken away for kicking him – he didn’t even acknowledge it because he captained his football club to a derby win over their biggest neighbours.

His reaction was first class.

But let’s be clear, we don’t want fans to be fenced in again.

We have safe standing and stadiums that are built to be safe – we really have come a long way but even talking about potentially fencing fans in again means we have gone back to those old days.

Let’s not forget we’re talking about a minority here.

But there has to be different arrangements for those games. I know they’re sometimes played very early to stop people drinking but you’re never going to stop that with an early kick-off time.

I think we need to get away from this, the game is safer but we’re always going have a minority.