Hillsborough - 20 years later

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/mar/15/hillsborough-disaster-survivors

I could have buried this in the soccer thread, but I think it merits it's own thread. In the coming weeks there will be mountains of stories on this subject in the UK. I suspect we'll be hearing about it as well.

If you need some background:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster

 

One of the seminal moments of my youth. Everything about soccer in Britain changed after that.

 

The Bradford fire stands out more for me, more perhaps because you could see the disaster unfold on the screen rather than in suffocating silence.

 

Wow. I never heard about this. Crazy.

 

I read a detailed account of that one a few years ago. Detestable that they let years of garbage pile up underneath the stand.

 

The only good thing about Hillsborough is that English football is much better for it. All-seaters, etc. It's too bad it took a tragedy to bring it about.

 

I think you could make the argument that, ironically, Hillsborough is at least part of the reason we HAVE a soccer thread here, or at least one that focuses so strongly on the English game. Had Hillsborough or something of its ilk not happened (and it inevitably would have), the culture of the game in England at the time was certainly not conducive to attracting international support and players and was likely leading the game down a path to complete ruin.

GB is right. It changed everything. And the attention it will get as the anniversary nears will be tremendous, as it should be.

 

Of all places, I heard about it as a 14-year-old watching the MTV Top 20 Video Countdown, because the star-studded remake of Ferry Cross The Mersey was No. 1 on the British Top 10 that they'd show midway through, and the video contained footage of the pitch and the chaos and the bodies. Pretty moving stuff.

EDIT: This may be the video I'm thinking of, or it could be someone dubbing the song with other footage. Pretty sure this is the version of the song that charted.

 

As a side note on the road to ruin, at the time of Hillsborough, English clubs were still banned from European competition after the hooliganism at the Heysel Stadium in 1985. It wasn't until 1990 that the ban was lifted for all except Liverpool, who served an extra year.

That English domestic soccer, the way it is policed, the way it is run, the way is has become has come as far as it has in the last 20 years is a minor miracle.

 

The Premiership was built on those 96 deaths and those families got nothing in return.

 

And from a newspaper perspective, at least nothing our masters have done in the last 25 years has done anything to alienate readers quite like The Sun did to salt the earth in Liverpool with their headline claims that their fans pissed on dead bodies and cops and beat up people giving CPR.

 

And just for those who don't know about Heysel, that one preceded the 1985 European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus. It was the fault of Liverpool fans and resulted in the deaths of 39 mostly Italian ex-pats living in Belgium. The responsibility for that went far deeper than the fans (selling "neutral" tickets next to the Liverpool supporters when Belgium was full of ex-pats, for one; hosting a European Cup final in a stadium that was literally falling apart for another), but the deaths were a result of their actions.

It took it happening to English fans before it really had an impact.

(Incredibly, that European Cup final was still played that night. They thought, probably correctly, that calling it off would have made the situation even worse.)