Liverpool fans who lost their lives remembered at the Leppings Lane End at Hillsborough yesterday (12/04/2014)
The next few days will be about Liverpool Football Club and
those who tragically lost their lives at Hillsborough on 15 April 1989. As a Wednesdayite it invokes terrible
feelings despite my being too young to remember the event. That stand I sat in
for my first game had seen horrors I still can barely imagine. My club, who I
love, were complicit in the needless deaths of 96 people. As a football fan and human being it invokes
disgust and shivers.
That disgust comes less from the more publicised events of
the aftermath (which still should be more so) but the fact it almost happened
before and so wasn’t some terrible accident. In 1981 Spurs played Wolves in an
FA Cup Semi-Final at Hillsborough. The same overcrowding and operational
incompetence could’ve seen the later horrors occur years earlier. The only
reason Ricky Villa’s slaloming run against Man City in the final is still a joy
to Spurs fans along with Chas and Dave based merriment is because the police
that day allowed 500 of them on to the pitch rather than see them crushed. There were also reportedly crushing incidents in a semi-final between the same two teams, Liverpool and Nottingham Forest in 1988, the year before the disaster.
Spurs fan Neil Irving talks about the 1981 game (From Mike Nicholson's documentary)
The fact that Hillsborough was even allowed to host the 1989 game is difficult to fathom today- as the Hillsborough Independent Panel said on the matter, “The risks were known and the crush in 1989 was foreseeable”. That’s even without thinking about the lessons of the 1985
Bradford City fire, Heysel and how generally old grounds with little
improvement since the 1930s might not quite be safe for fans 50 years later.
Thankfully these days it’s now almost unimaginable that such
obvious neglect would happen again. In theory laws were in place to stop
potential death traps, but remote laws have a habit of being interpreted selectively
by those in charge when they feel they can act with impunity.
Despite the fact that in theory laws were in place to
protect, it has been regularly reported that those
who thought they could get away with it with the regularity and wantonness
unruly toddlers usually reserve for their mother’s instructions.
The tragedy and subsequent despicable arse-covering
(including Premier League Chairman Sir Dave Richards’ refusal to put up amemorial on ‘legal advice’) that’s led to the families waiting until now for
any kind of justice, shouldn’t therefore be seen as an isolated piece of 1980s bastardry,
but as a logical consequence of what happens when people feel they’re
unaccountable.
1989 may seem like another country and thankfully to most of
us it is, yet the abuse of power and contempt for those without the means to
speak-up is hardly something that’s entirely gone away. In football,
administrators and owners cut from the same cloth as those who allowed Hillsborough
to happen rely on the silent acquiescence of fans enthralled by the game to
behave terribly, albeit with less deadly consequences. In Qatar, Russia, and
yes Brazil, the same contempt for ordinary people is, and will still cause death
in the name of football.
One only needs a pair of eyes to see that the same corruption
and incompetence with no consequence still has the propensity to ruin and end
lives, whether it be in the police, press or government today.
Rightly this weekend will be about those who lost their
lives, their families, their fight for justice and a wonderful city’s coming
together for them. Perhaps though, we can honour them not just by a minute's silence but by being profound
sceptics about the intentions and actions of those with the power to harm.
A tragedy correctly invokes our deepest sympathies for those who lost their lives, but for those of us not directly involved and too young to remember the vagaries of football's dark battles of the 1980s it can come without context. Without the bitter experience of events it's easy to see the events of 15 April 1989 in isolation, rather than the product of sinister attitudes which are far more common than we'd like to admit.
There will be those in the future who face profound injustice like the families
of those who died at Hillsborough, although hopefully not on the same horrifying scale. We should make sure that they never walk alone.
You can give to the Hillsborough Family Support Group and learn more here.
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