Holy crap, is this a good one. It’s the story of the 1989 FA Cup semi-final where 96 people were crushed to death. It’s absolutely horrifying to watch, but you can’t take your eyes off the screen.
Scousers never buy the Sun.
The disaster also served as part of the story for To Be a Somebody. They were the first 3 episodes of season 2 of Cracker which is still the best TV series I have ever seen. It was the first time I ever saw Robert Carlyle and he made an immediate impression.
And the TV Film is well worth seeing.
Will never forget Grandstand on the BBC saying something had happened and switching to it.
Same here. I also remember World of Sport going over live to Bradford just in time to see a man on the pitch, on fire.
I heard Dan Patrick talking about this movie on his radio show this morning, but as a Yank who doesn’t follow soccer, I confess I knew almost nothing about the incident.
I gather that, essentially, dozens of people were killed and hundreds injured due to trampling or crushing at an overcrowded football game. And it SOUNDS as if there were major coverups by the police.
But since I’ve never been to a British football match, there’s a lot I don’t understand. Do spectators NOT have assigned seats at such games? Certainly, every spectator at a American football or baseball playoff game would have assigned seating. Sure, during the regular season, people are allowed to find seats wherever they can in the bleacher section… but during the playoffs, even the bleacher seats are assigned by row and number.
I get the impression that soccer stadiums have Standing Room Only sections… how many people are supposed to be allowed in those sections? Who decides how many people get into them? Wouldn’t there be a strict numerical limit to how many people are allowed even in THOSE sections? Wouldn’t even the people standing need tickets, and wouldn’t even THOSE tickets sell out after a certain point?
Certainly, trampling/crushing disasters ahve happened in the USA at certain events- most notably that Who concert in Cincinnati. That was due to “festival seating,” which meant a ticket only gives you entry into the arena (after that, you had to race to get the best possible seats). But fesatival seating has always been rare at concerts, and almost unheard of in major American sports.
In those days most football stadia had standing room only terraces and maybe a few stands with seats. One of the reforms post-Hillsborough was to require all FA stadia to become seat-only.
And they would generally put the fans in “pens” surrounded by fences to keep (some subset of) rival fans from attacking one another. At this disaster, IIRC, the central pens were overfilled, the crush barriers (which, if you require crush barriers you might be skirting danger, no?) failed, and several other horrible decisions were made by the people running the event.
Then they tried to blame it all on drunk and unruly fans, accusing them of some particularly nasty (and completely made up) things.
That’s Match of the Day, the BBC’s long running football roundup show, from the late evening of the day of the disaster. Jimmy Hill was the Manager and later Chairman of my team, Coventry City. Coventry made lots of changes in the early 1980s to make Coventry safe and family friendly, including making Highfield Road the UK’s first all-seater stadium.
It was very unpopular and eventually the club bowed to demands and put back a standing section. Jimmy, in that video, is clearly upset as he knew how unsafe stadiums were at the time and had tried to do something about it. For those like astorian that have no experience of how football was then it must seem very strange, but that’s just how crappy things were even as recently as the 1980s in the UK. The Taylor Report, that came as a result of the Hilssborough Disaster changed a lot of things, but then also the Premier League happened, money flooded the game and its modernisation was complete.
Oh yeah. For those that don’t know:
All lies.
Has The Sun ever published anything that was* true*? 
As a fairly new observer of BPL, I had never known the particulars of this gruesome story. Well done by the director.
I also never knew Wednesday’s stadium was that large. There are clubs currently in PL with stadiums almost half that size (54,000 at the time).
American coverage, in that pre-Internet age, was generally restricted to stories and still photographs. But, I remember reading enough to be squicked out.
Ever since, whenever I’m in a large, surging crowd, I get panicky and elbow my way to the edge as quickly as possible, even if that takes me opposite to where I’m going. I regard this as a good thing.
Wasn’t one of the things to come out of the Taylor report a requirement that all (what are now) Premier League stadiums be all-seater?
(Note that this refers to the 1985 Bradford City fire)
The one thing I really remember about the Bradford City fire was CNN starting a news show with a “This Just In” graphic and an announcement of the fire - two hours after it started.
Back to the OP…I have a feeling a considerable chunk of Liverpool (if not England football fans in general) won’t be happy until somebody serves time for “corporate manslaughter” over this.
Right after it happened, the magazine When Saturday Comes had this cover. (The two men on top are Graham Kelly, then chief executive of the FA, and South Yorkshire Police constable Peter Wright. Remember that Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister at the time.)
I think one of the reasons for the reaction was, Heysel was still fresh in quite a few people’s minds. (At the 1985 European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus, at the Heysel stadium in Belgium, a group of Liverpool fans “invaded.” for lack of a better word for it, the Juventus fans’ area; in the attempt to escape, 33 people were crushed against a retaining wall and died. AFAIK, this really was “the fans’ fault.”)
God, I couldn’t get to sleep last night.
I understand that this show is not going to be broadcast in the UK for a year due to a new investigation that has just begun into the incident. You should try to get your hands on a copy of it anyway, unless you’re on the jury, of course.
The first half is footage of before, during, and after the disaster along with interviews of fans in attendance and police. You see the crowd build outside the stadium and see the police get more and more disturbed and frightened. They finally decide to just throw open the gates just before kickoff and then the deadly crush begins. I don’t know how much has been shown on British TV or is available online, but the footage is EXTREMELY graphic and disturbing. You see the bodies crushed into the fences, but also the pitch littered with the dead, their bellies exposed because the fans pulled their red shirts up to cover their faces. One panned shot shows seven or eight people frantically performing CPR on lifeless bodies and another shot has a body on a stretcher with his arms dangling to the ground on either side.
The second half discusses the aftermath and the changes to the game that happened, as well as the coverup. Families of the missing were herded into a boys club and forced to wait as the police brought them into a room one by one to look at a wall of Polaroids of the dead and identify their loved ones. If they recognized someone they would bring in the body on a stretcher for positive ID. It was awful.
The whitewashing of the true story was despicable. I’m more disturbed today than I was watching it last night.
At the time a couple of newspapers used images of people in the last moments of their lives, with their still recognisable faces crushing into the wire mesh of the fence. I’ve no desire to see that again.
There’s a lot of things went wrong that day, and there’s a lot of blame to go around, but the way it has been handled at an official level until recently has led many of the families of the innocent 96 dead to not be able to achieve any kind of peace and closure. Hopefully, they’ll get that soon.
There was a not-that-much-earlier lesson to be learned for football clubs in Britain - the Ibrox disaster in 1971 where a crowd crush killed 66 and injured hundreds. Rangers started the move to make the stadium seated after that.
They had the decency to blur the faces of the dead and dying on last night’s documentary.
Yes, but the point was that it was known that these things were dangerous and things needed modified. It was a clear example of someone that had tried to affect this change and the football world was against him. I was trying to show how things were back then.
Also swept under the rug at the time was the lack of safety certificate for the stadium. In the 1981 FA Cup semi-final, there were concerns of the exact same tragedy that befell Hillsborough 8 years later. In all that time- and in fact, since 1979- the ground did not have a valid safety certificate.
My wife grew up in the area, and we attended a Sheffield Wednesday match once while visiting. I had heard of the disaster, but not the details until last night.
It was a very well done 30 for 30, and possibly the best I’ve seen. Very moving.