Very good piece. You have to remember though that there had been a generation of extreme football violence that the police had been dealing with. I am convinced that this contributed to their gross negligence that day.
In 1985 Liverpool fans were involved in another disaster where, due to LFC fans’ actions, 39 Juventus fans were killed at Hysel Stadium in Belgium.
Nice to see we got over 20 posts before someone mentioned Heysel. What does Heysel have anything to do with the events that took place after Hillsborough?
The biggest difference between the two is that the people who were held responsible for that tragedy were charged and convicted. No, it doesn’t excuse the needless deaths of the 39, but Juventus fans didn’t have to spend their lives watching as the rest of the football world labelled them scum and thieves who pissed on their own brethren.
What does the gross negligence of that day have anything to do with the decades of lies that followed? No one is denying the violent culture of football hooligans back in the 70’s and 80’s, but none of these things have anything to do with why officials claimed Kevin Williams, aged 15, was dead at 3:15, when later evidence showed the last thing he did was call out for his mom, at 4pm.
And extreme football violence doesn’t explain why the FA let that ground continue to host football matches despite not having a valid safety certificate since 1979.
The Sun represents the “rest of the footballing world”? Liverpool fans had a dreadful reputation which includes Hysel (and never gets mentioned by the club). There was a bias towards fans of LFC because of their past actions.
The football hooliganism, which involved fans of all clubs, created a culture of violence and fear which affected the police as much as the average fan. I believe this had an impact at Hillsborough as the police saw a big crowd and simply panicked.
Now none of this excuses the cover up and the gross negligence of the police but it was a factor in why this happened.
As for the shoddy stadiums, frankly neither the FA nor most owners cared about the average fan. After all, football fans were seen lower class scrotes. Crap stadiums were good enough for the peasants.
Seems highly unlikely. One of the big problems was that there weren’t enough police for crowd control, surely an expectation of hooliganism would have led to more police being provided, not less.
Most of the dead were killed when a wall collapsed, it’s another run-down stadium problem. UEFA preferred to blame English fans as it allowed them to excuse themselves and the continental clubs, not to mention scape-goating English clubs and banning them for five years from continental competition. English clubs had, of course, won seven of the last nine European Cups before the ban.
Oh shut up. I’m not even a Liverpool fan (indeed, if anything I should dislike them. Due to Heysel my own club, Coventry City, couldn’t play in Europe for the only time in my life that they qualified - in 1987) but that is absolute bollocks.
http://www.liverpoolfc.com/search/q/heysel
There you go. Lots of stuff at their own website, including an article about the permanent memorial plaque at their own ground.
Absolute nonsense, and confirms my suspicion that while you may think you know the subject, you don’t, not really, and I speak not only of Hillsborough, but of Heysel as well. As mentioned by amanset, do a bit of research on Liverpool’s very own website if you want to see how Heysel “never gets mentioned by the club”. Dreadful reputation which includes Heysel- what else does it include? I’m curious to hear what other past actions, particularly domestic ones, Liverpool fans were known for prior to Hillsborough, because only Heysel is ever brought up.
It was an absolute shambles of communication and organization. How the police didn’t have a contingency plan for the amount of fans arriving to an FA Cup semi-final is beyond me.
You’ve had a tough time of it lately, haven’t you, being a Coventry fan? Thank you for posting the LFC link.
Hehe. Yeah. The Guardian recently had an article about long-suffering fans and many mentioned in the comments that it was weird that they somehow missed us out. No promotion since the sixties from any division. No top six position since 1969/70. Recent relegations. Docking of ten points during last season and starting on -10 points this season. Not owning our own stadium anymore. Argument with the local council seeing us playing 35 miles away in Northampton and fans on mass refusing to see the “home” games.
Actually, there was an article in the local paper this week asking if Coventry are the only club who has a larger away support than home support:
Wait, what? You must have been promoted at least once. How else would you have been in the Premiership? And if you were in the First Division and Premiership the whole time from the sixties until relegation I don’t think you have much to complain about.
Gained promotion in the 1967-68 season. Since then have finished in a single digit position six times in any league. The highest of which was eighth.
This is true. The decades of violence and hooliganism from all clubs ensured that the fences stayed and the attitude of the authorities remained. Heysel contributed to the overall atmosphere of mistrusting the fans but honestly, Liverpool was not a particularly bad offender regarding violence.
The innocents that died on that day happened to be Liverpool fans but it could have easily been the Forest fans instead, it was an accident waiting to happen.
The authorities were incompetent certainly, their contingencies were lacking and they had been conditioned over the years to expect the worst from football fans. The root cause of the tragedy though was the disgusting behaviour of the scum fans over the previous years. They are the ones who forced clubs into segregation and caging and as such they bear a high proportion of the responsibility for the inevitability of such a tragedy if not for the individual event on the day.
And yes, that means fans at all clubs bear a portion of that blame, Liverpool included.
This doesn’t get any easier to watch the second time.
I clearly remember a photograph from field level of people crushed up against the wire mesh fence published in the aftermath, far more graphic that anything they put into the doc, really. Pretty sure it was in Sports Illustrated (which my family had a subscription to) or another sports mag picked up at my barber, doctor, or dentist. Still haunting in my memory.
Blah blah blah American fans don’t do that we all probably thought on this side of the Atlantic at the time, but in 1993 I was a student at the University of Wisconsin and there was a crush in the student section at Camp Randall Stadium in the post-game celebration after a win over Michigan. I wasn’t at the game, but we were damn lucky no one got killed that day.
Read the last paragraph to post #14 in the thread. Even if Liverpool fans did not “directly” kill anybody, what caused the spectators who did die to run towards that wall in the first place? It seems to me that the Hillsborough reaction was a case of “rounding up the usual suspects” regardless of how guilty anybody was (either there or at Heysel).
i remember that exact same picture in SI, it is still clear as day to me. In fact I recall one fella with a beard and…ugh, can’t even.
I actually knew quite about about Hillsborough, but the one thing I didn’t really know about was the change in the police that happened just weeks before, taking out somebody who had a history of monitoring and controlling crowds at Hillsborough with a man who knew fuck-all.
Also telling was the toll it obviously took on some of the police that were there that day.
For those who haven’t seen the program, it’s available on YouTube in seven parts:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3Part 4Part 5Here’s the Sports Illustrated article from 1989 about the disaster. Note that it took the lead from official sources and largely blamed the fans.
That’s the first twelve minutes of the programme I linked to further upthread (in a post concerning Jimmy Hill’s reaction to it and how he’d brought in England’s first all-seater stadium in the early 80s and it was so unpopular they put a standing section back in). The full 30 minute show is here:
There was an excellent *New Yorker *article a couple years ago about the science behind crowd disasters like this one. Here it is. A detail that stuck with me is how someone entering a calm atrium of a stadium might have no idea that their simple little action is causing the death of someone being squeezed inside the building, through an inevitable chain reaction.
Having finally watched the show, could some please elucidate exactly what “justice” the families want at this point? I get that they wanted the “accidental death” ruling expunged, which they got. They tried a private prosecution, which failed.
Are they looking for criminal charges against Dunkenfield (sp) and co? Or financial compensation? Or what, exactly?