Team Work

If you walk into a group of over-excited beered up lads to tell them their night of revelry at the venue is over you either need to be mentally defective or very good at teamwork.
It helps to know where your team mates are, where their attention is, what attitude they've brought with them tonight, what their personal views on different types of punters and even whether they've been on a rest day or a legs day in the gym. All of these things will allow you to be more effective, know what you can stretch to without getting your arse kicked or worse.

When you work with a team that you know well most of the time you can tell how they're going to react to situations. You can see them tense, you can hear their voice change, you can hear what's said to them and guess pretty exactly how they'll take it. I much prefer working with a consistent doorman than a temperamental one. Even a supplement filled short fused potential death machine can be a good teammate in the right venue if you can reliably predict their actions. If you play to the strengths of each member the team can do everything at a level far higher than any given doorman.

Back to the wandering into a crowd of inebriated gents. Don't ever make threats you can't carry out and know how to get yourself out even if you have to fell some of the group to get your arse safely out of there. A tight team gives you the knowledge they'll be watching when you need them. They'll know what you can and can't handle, they'll know when you're about to blow and it might be time to step in. This stag night ended for them and went surprisingly well for us. I wandered in to read the riot act.
"Calm it down right now lads" This got all eyes on me and some agreement, some jeering.
"If there is even a reason to come over and speak to you again you'll all be out". This got nods and a lot less jeering. With people beyond a certain level of drunk only a little bit of what you say ever sticks and little of this sinks in.
While I wandered back to where I prefer to stand and keep an eye on things one of them flattened a glass collector in an act of drunken stumbling dancing. Now there's broken glass everywhere and it's time to shift the group. Dancing oaf gets a gentle guided stagger to the street. Half of the remaining group sup up and start out to join him. The last half stay fast and pose the annoying choice of struggling them one by one to the street or bundling the lot up and scrummaging them as fast as you can to the pavement. We chose option 2. They clumped together to stop a forced ejection and found they just kept on moving. In a tangle of punters with a generous coating of doormen they wound round a corner or two, down a short flight of stairs and out into the night where, when we scurried away back to work, they were left looking like a flock of sheep without a collie ready to wander off to pastures new or get maneaten by the wolves. Likely a hen night from Paisley.