From the Independent, nonetheless [all fancy editing, and the usual localisation :-) is mine, mine, mine]:

Euro 2004 kicks off [it sure kicked] in Portugal this weekend, [we neeed to overwrite that memory] but the sight of belligerent Englishmen staggering through the streets will be nothing new for the locals. From the Crusaders to Francis Drake to Lord Byron, Robert Chalmers recounts an inglorious history.

"The thing that worries me," a friend said, "is that when the English fans get to Portugal, we're going to see exactly the same kind of things that happened in Belgium."
"You mean at Charleroi," I asked him, "in Euro 2000?"
"I mean at Passchendaele," he said, "in 1917."
(...)
Most football experts believe that, even though Portugal seems to offer all the requirements for an English riot - sun, cheap drink, late bars, a border with many points of entry and a police force with a muscular tradition - Euro 2004, like Italia 90, will be one of those tournaments where widespread disorder doesn't materialise.
(...)
In the many wars that have threatened to reduce the country of Figo, Eusébio and Cristiano Ronaldo to a permanent province of Spain or France, Portugal and England have almost always been on the same side. The countries' shared heritage can be seen everywhere, from the port wine lodges by the River Douro to the lovingly polished makers' plates from Liverpool, Manchester and Wolverhampton on the turbines in the awesome Museum of Electricity in Lisbon.
In addition to an estimated 60,000 travelling England fans, there will be about 200,000 UK citizens on holiday, or resident, in Portugal this month. It will be the largest group of British nationals ever assembled in the country - but not the most intimidating, or even the least welcome.
(...)
[Notwithstanding...]
The term "bêbado inglês" - English drunkard - was well established by 1190, when 700 Crusaders rioted in Lisbon and were locked up, a witness wrote, "for running through the city and attacking its citizens with violence".
(...)
In the 16th century, the Portuguese had established (and brutalised) their own colonies in Africa and the New World. Nostalgia for this glorious heritage helped to inspire the condition they call saudade, usually defined as a tendency to dwell on ancient triumphs and be plagued by the feeling that things will never be so good again - a syndrome most English football supporters should recognise.

As early as the 1750s, Portugal was a popular tourist destination for the English aristocracy, especially if they had TB, which they transmitted to the locals who nursed them in their villas. Many invalids, such as Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones, found their release in death and were buried in Portugal. But, even if they regained their health, it seemed that the English in Portugal were never happy.

A selection of complaints from yellowing British guide-books, letters and journals include: not enough trees, too many Portuguese, too much dirt and too few ruins. A 19th-century journalist, Oswald Crawford, found that the Portuguese had blighted their land with the noise of the guitar ("an effeminate instrument", said Crawford, who is fortunate not to have lived to see his compatriot David Bowie in fishnet tights straddling the late Mick Ronson during their live performances of Ziggy Stardust).

Lord Byron, who visited Sintra in 1809, wasn't the only one to conclude (he doesn't say why) that the locals were too dim for their own landscape ("Why, nature, waste thy wonders on such men?"). Another failing was the inability of many Portuguese to understand an Englishman who spoke only English: this annoyed Fielding, who found the energy, before he died in 1754, to describe Lisbon as "the nastiest city in the world".

The definitive history of the madmen, freaks and assassins England has exported to the country is Rose Macaulay's masterpiece They Went to Portugal. The first volume of this extraordinary epic was published in 1946; the second did not appear until 1990, when Carcanet Press had the wit to assemble it from the writer's notes.

The tone of almost every English visitor whose musings are recorded is of incessant whinging. The poet Robert Southey describes Portugal's women as "cattle" and its men as "indolent" - this from someone whose best friend was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a man given to reclining on a chaise longue with a pint of laudanum and a pen. The writer and religious fanatic George Borrow came to Lisbon in 1835 "with plans for the mental improvement of the Portuguese," but was then "forced" (his word) "to drink its coarse and filthy wines, which no other nation cares to taste".
(...)
[Yet another luminary]
Adopting the strategy popular with later generations of English paedophiles, [William] Beckford relocated with some urgency to a country unfamiliar with his past. In Portugal, he notes how he enjoys "stretching myself on the sands by moonlight," his arm around "some sick, languid youth". In the manuscript, this last noun has been crossed out and replaced with the word "girl".
[enough of paedophilia...]
(...)
But there is no bygone expatriate whose writing is more reminiscent of the kind of hooligan literature now enjoying a revival in the UK than Lady Elizabeth Craven, who arrived in Portugal in 1791, where she found "dust, stinks, horrid faces, Bells, contents of Chamberpots, fleas, vile curs, horrid Blacks, bad water, no good wine" and "horrid negro airs. Such," she wrote, "are the delights of Portugal."

Her view of the world, as revealed in her writing - absolute self-obsession, cowardice when unaccompanied by compatriots, an unshakeable sense of her superiority to the host nation, a mistrust of local officials (especially those handling law enforcement), her specific dislike of black faces, and above all a sense that nothing befalling her could possibly be the result of her own actions - define the mentality of the travelling English football fan, as echoed in the many memoirs of "battling" now on most sports bookshops' shelves.
[For instance:]
Take Invasion and Deportation: a diary of Euro 2000, in which two England supporters, Matthew Bazell and Jamie Mash, bemoan their treatment in Belgium. [further reading is believing, I tell you]
(...)
For the most part, modern English misdemeanours in Portugal are increasingly in the Spanish mould: timeshare fraud, extortion rackets and - as always - drink. And yet there is almost nothing in newspaper libraries to suggest any significant football violence in Portugal - by the English or anyone else.

The thing that's really difficult to understand, I said to Duarte Baião, the football correspondent of the newspaper A Bola, is why - given an 850-year tourist history from which the English hardly emerge unblemished - they have never troubled Portugal with their favourite sin, football hooliganism? God knows they've had enough chances, at club and international level. The two countries are even in the same time-zone. Is there something wrong with the Portuguese?

"Football violence is not a national preoccupation in Portugal," Baião said, "in the way that it is in, er, how should I put it..."

"England?"
(...)
[I wouldn't say it better meselfa :-]]]
Perhaps the Portuguese - who, as any visitor will notice, are refreshingly unburdened by patriotic zeal - are just nicer people than the English? "I am not saying we are morally superior," Baiao replies. "We are much more dangerous, for instance, on the roads. It's just that our weaknesses take other forms."
(...)
[our police force, yet again]
Ticket-holders for Euro 2004 will trust that the mentality of the Portuguese police has undergone a similarly radical reconstruction, and that officers are no longer prone to become (to quote Kevin Sands, a businessman who was in the Porto stadium seven years ago) "pumped up and looking for a fight". The police have announced plans to breathalyse fans on match days - a plan which (as anybody familiar with the frenzied atmosphere around a stadium before a big European game will know) shows that at least they can't be accused of lacking ambition.
(...)
That said, it may not be so unrealistic to imagine that, as the England supporters queue for their flights home, their conversation may not be dominated, as it often has been, by matters such as police lines and broken glass, and that some travellers will return with memories that echo - perhaps not in every detail of their visit - the experience of William Beckford. "How often," Beckford wrote, "did I bless the hour when my steps were directed to Portugal."
[he's back! with a vengeance]

When it's all over, and this latest wave of English invaders have gone home, you can only hope that, on the part of the Portuguese nation, such generous feelings are reciprocated.