No probs...here is my Hillsborough post, but obviously please visit the http://rnevitt.blogspot.com for more ;-)
Hillsborough
The great Bill Shankly once remarked “Football is not just a matter of life and death. It is much more important than that”. On 15th April 1989, Liverpool fans realised, that for all his undoubted brilliance, Shanks had maybe got this quote wrong.
One year earlier, we had travelled to Hillsborough to watch Liverpool play Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final. As I was just turned 10, we got there early so I could get a good vantage point on one of the barriers at the front of the terrace. When John Aldridge volleyed Liverpool to Wembley, the pressure from the surge of Liverpool fans was greater than I had ever experienced, but never did I feel in danger.
Twelve months on, it was Groundhog Day. Same occasion, same venue, same teams. As for any of the big games, there was a clamour for tickets. Six or seven of my dad’s mates wanted to go, so the possibility of a renting a minibus was explored. However, at that time, I was playing youth football on a Saturday morning. On that day, I had my own big cup game to play, so it was decided I would play for an hour, meaning we would leave for Hillsborough slightly later than usual. One of my dad’s mates, Steven Brown, said he wanted to get to the ground early to get a good spec, so he would make his own way down, and meet us there.
Semi-Final day arrived. As with any semi-final day I can remember, there was glorious sunshine, it was always one of the best days on the football calendar. I played the first hour of my match, scoring a volley to put us 3-1 up. At that point, I was substituted, so that I could get washed and changed ready for the off. Four of my dad’s mates met up with us and we set-off in a 6-seater rental car.
At the time, my grandparents owned a pub just outside of Wrexham. My gran was a big Liverpool fan. For home games, our pre-match ritual was for Dad and I to go to the pub, have dinner with gran, then watch a bit of Grandstand or the "Saint and Greavsie". Just before we left, Dad would always give Gran a kiss and ask her who was going to win. The answer was always Liverpool, no matter whom we were playing. If ever Dad got up the road and realised he hadn’t asked the question, he would turn around and head back to the pub.
That morning, after we left my youth game, we stopped off at the pub to get my gran’s biased opinion on who was going through to Wembley. As it was around 11:30am, the pub was busy with the Saturday dinner time customers, most of them getting ready to watch the horse racing, placing bets with my “bookie-for-the-day” grandad. Gran obviously said Liverpool would win and everyone wished us luck, as if we were the ones going to play the match. We jumped back into the car and set-off on the 2½ hour journey over the Pennines to Sheffield.
As we approached Sheffield, we all started to feel hungry, so it was decided that we stopped at the next Fish and Chip shop. Dad and I disliked, and both still do, chips from the chippy. I don’t know what it is about them, we just don’t like them! But on that day, we stopped for a bag each, adding what turned out to be an extra 20 life-saving minutes onto our journey.
It was around 2 o’clock by the time we reached Sheffield. We found a quiet housing estate within a mile of the ground and parked there, giving one of the local lads a couple of quid to “mind the car”. We headed straight to the ground. Hillsborough was one of the biggest grounds in the country. One end was the massive Kop, the other end an aging terrace /stand. Liverpool averaged over 40,000 for every home game, Nottingham Forest only 25,000. But instead of giving Liverpool the Kop end, Forest had it due to geographical reasons. This was one of the many mistakes made.
When we got outside the entrance to the Leppings Lane end, the crowds were gathering. The turnstiles were old and decrepit, so access through them was slow. We made our way to one of the queues and waited. Next thing we knew, a mounted policeman opened a huge blue gate, later confirmed as “Gate C”, and ordered my dad to go through there. We did as we were told, expecting to see more, empty turnstiles. To our shock, there weren’t any, we were actually in the Leppings Lane End. Our tickets in hand, still fully intact. Quickly other fans followed us. One of my dad’s mates, Paul, who is 6ft 4ish so hard to miss, headed down towards the central tunnel. We were going to follow him so that we had a good view behind the goal, but everyone seemed to be heading there. Another one of the lads, Gary, shouted Paul back. Gary had been at Heysel stadium 4 years earlier when 39 Juventus fans lost their lives. He said that something wasn’t right, that the last time he felt like that was on the fateful night in Belgium. Instead, we went to the right hand side of the Leppings Lane end, ultimately stopping in one of the side pens midway between the goal and the corner flag. The pen was busy, but nowhere near what we had experienced 12 months earlier. Most fans had headed for the middle pens, so many that they were now holding nearly double their safe capacity.
2:55pm, the players came out to a rapturous welcome. The coin was tossed, Liverpool were defending the Leppings Lane end. The game kicked off, with Liverpool on the front foot as always. A Liverpool throw-in down the right resulted in Peter Beardsley hitting the crossbar. As the ball rebounded off the bar, people coming through the central tunnel surged forward to see what had happened. A crush barrier in one of the middle pens gave way, causing people in the already crowded middle pens to fall over. Over 3000 fans were fenced in with nowhere to go. If Beardsley had actually scored, the crowd would have started to celebrate, jumping up and down, hundreds more would almost certainly have suffered.
The match played on, no-one else in the ground knew properly what was happening in those central pens, not even us in the pen next door. For those trapped, the only way out was over the fences, which had been brought in to make it extremely difficult for fans to climb over, or up to the stand above. As fans called out for help, Bruce Grobbelaar, the Liverpool goalkeeper started to look around to see what was going on. Police started to move in, fearing hooliganism was about to rear its ugly head once again. At 3:06pm, as a few fans made it over the fence to safety on to the pitch, the referee stopped the game and took the players back to the dressing rooms.
The atmosphere suddenly changed. Most of the ground wondered what was going on. The Nottingham Forest fans at the other end of the stadium thought Liverpool fans were causing trouble. They chanted “Heysel” in reference to what had happened 4 years earlier, although to be fair, as it became clear that people were hurt, the Forest fans attitude did change. As more people poured out over the fences, we could tell something was wrong. Fans from the upper stand that sat above the Leppings Lane terrace, started pulling people out of the central pens into the upper tier. The police continued to stand there doing nothing. Ambulance sirens could be heard in the distance, but I only saw one actually make it to the pitch. More fans made it over the fences, pulling the injured out with them.
My eyes wandered around the pitch. Where I expected to see Barnes, Beardsley and Aldridge strutting their stuff, there were now people everywhere. Some were dazed and confused taking deep breathes of air, others were frantically running around, trying to save lives. Advertising hoardings became make-shift stretchers. I can remember seeing a young boy being laid out in the penalty area directly in front of me. He was probably only 10 or 11, around the same age as me. The men with him desperately tried to resuscitate him, but to no avail. One of them placed a coat over his head. I was shell-shocked. My dad and his mates hardly spoke. I don’t think I can remember anybody around us talking.
To the right of where we were standing, in between the Leppings Lane End and Main Stand, was the Stadium control room. Graham Kelly, the then Chief Executive of the FA, walked up the steps to the room to survey what was going on. When spotted, Liverpool fans shouted him to do something, “People are dying in there”. But nothing was done; he looked like a rabbit caught in headlights.
After a while, Kenny Dalglish addressed the fans via the tannoy system, “There has been an accident, Please remain calm”. At 3:30pm the game was officially called off. We left the stadium. Outside ambulances were everywhere. As we walked to the car we could hear people speculating, 5 dead, 10 dead, we couldn’t believe it. When we got in the car and switched BBC Radio on, the full details of what had happened were starting to come through.
Back at my grandparents’ pub, my gran was watching Grandstand, waiting for score updates. When they switched to live coverage from Hillsborough, the panic started to kick in. Quickly she phoned my mum to let her know what had happened. They knew that Dad and I normally got as close to the front as we could, so that I had a good view. They immediately thought the worst. The phone at the pub started ringing constantly, customers who had wished us good luck earlier that day, parents from my youth football team, friends, family, were all phoning to see if we were OK. But mum, gran and grandad couldn’t say we were OK, they didn’t know. They watched Grandstand, and BBC News flashes, praying that they could see we were safe. I’ve never really spoken to my mum about how she felt that day, but it must have been torture.
As we left Sheffield, we knew we had to contact home. With mobile phones unheard of, phone boxes were packed. Locals stood outside their houses with notices “Liverpool fans, phone home”. Some were charging 50p a call, making money out of a disaster. It felt like ages before we finally found a house where there wasn’t a queue of waiting for the phone. Dad pulled over and asked to use the phone. I remember him passing the phone to me to speak to mum. I could hear the relief in her voice.
The rest of the journey home was quiet. With every news bulletin, the number of fatalities grew. By the time we arrived back in Wrexham, the number was in the mid 70’s. When we walked in to our house, mum was relieved to see us, but angry with my dad for taking me, even though I had been to loads of games before. Later that evening, maybe the following morning, dad found out that his mate Steven Brown, the one who made his own way to the match, was one of the fatalities.
Over the next few days, people kept asking if I was OK. I thought I was, though it hadn’t really sunk in what had happened, what I had witnessed. Anfield was opened up as a shrine to the victims. Mum, Dad, me and my 2 brothers all went to pay our respects. We laid a bouquet of flowers on the Anfield pitch, and then walked around the Kop, reading the messages of support from fans of every team in the country. I can remember standing on the Kop, not far from where we would be on a match day, looking out at the flower-covered pitch, at the scarves draped over every barrier, at the hundreds of people who were there, like me, wondering why this had happened. At that point I started to cry.
The local newspaper came round and interviewed Dad and I regarding the tragedy. We were pictured holding our untouched tickets, tickets which we still have to this day. We tried to make sure everybody knew it wasn't LIverpool fans' fault, that too many mistakes had been made by the FA and by the police. Dad arranged a charity football match in the memory of Steven Brown, donating the money to his grief-stricken family.
Three weeks after the tragedy, Liverpool played their first competitive match; fittingly it was away to Everton. The whole of Merseyside came together in a public display of grief, as they did in the most emotional FA Cup final ever one month later. Dad and I went to all the games. I think going to them helped us come to terms with what had happened, helped bring some normality back.
The number of fatalities eventually reached 96. Ninety-six people, who had travelled to watch a football match, but never returned home. During the nearly 22 years since, inquests have taken place to find out what exactly happened on that fateful day, but the truth has never fully come out. Earlier this week, Justice Chiefs have confirmed that all documents relating to the disaster, will be analysed. Hopefully then JUSTICE FOR THE 96 will finally be found.
YNWA
Rob
Hillsborough
The great Bill Shankly once remarked “Football is not just a matter of life and death. It is much more important than that”. On 15th April 1989, Liverpool fans realised, that for all his undoubted brilliance, Shanks had maybe got this quote wrong.
One year earlier, we had travelled to Hillsborough to watch Liverpool play Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final. As I was just turned 10, we got there early so I could get a good vantage point on one of the barriers at the front of the terrace. When John Aldridge volleyed Liverpool to Wembley, the pressure from the surge of Liverpool fans was greater than I had ever experienced, but never did I feel in danger.
Twelve months on, it was Groundhog Day. Same occasion, same venue, same teams. As for any of the big games, there was a clamour for tickets. Six or seven of my dad’s mates wanted to go, so the possibility of a renting a minibus was explored. However, at that time, I was playing youth football on a Saturday morning. On that day, I had my own big cup game to play, so it was decided I would play for an hour, meaning we would leave for Hillsborough slightly later than usual. One of my dad’s mates, Steven Brown, said he wanted to get to the ground early to get a good spec, so he would make his own way down, and meet us there.
Semi-Final day arrived. As with any semi-final day I can remember, there was glorious sunshine, it was always one of the best days on the football calendar. I played the first hour of my match, scoring a volley to put us 3-1 up. At that point, I was substituted, so that I could get washed and changed ready for the off. Four of my dad’s mates met up with us and we set-off in a 6-seater rental car.
At the time, my grandparents owned a pub just outside of Wrexham. My gran was a big Liverpool fan. For home games, our pre-match ritual was for Dad and I to go to the pub, have dinner with gran, then watch a bit of Grandstand or the "Saint and Greavsie". Just before we left, Dad would always give Gran a kiss and ask her who was going to win. The answer was always Liverpool, no matter whom we were playing. If ever Dad got up the road and realised he hadn’t asked the question, he would turn around and head back to the pub.
That morning, after we left my youth game, we stopped off at the pub to get my gran’s biased opinion on who was going through to Wembley. As it was around 11:30am, the pub was busy with the Saturday dinner time customers, most of them getting ready to watch the horse racing, placing bets with my “bookie-for-the-day” grandad. Gran obviously said Liverpool would win and everyone wished us luck, as if we were the ones going to play the match. We jumped back into the car and set-off on the 2½ hour journey over the Pennines to Sheffield.
As we approached Sheffield, we all started to feel hungry, so it was decided that we stopped at the next Fish and Chip shop. Dad and I disliked, and both still do, chips from the chippy. I don’t know what it is about them, we just don’t like them! But on that day, we stopped for a bag each, adding what turned out to be an extra 20 life-saving minutes onto our journey.
It was around 2 o’clock by the time we reached Sheffield. We found a quiet housing estate within a mile of the ground and parked there, giving one of the local lads a couple of quid to “mind the car”. We headed straight to the ground. Hillsborough was one of the biggest grounds in the country. One end was the massive Kop, the other end an aging terrace /stand. Liverpool averaged over 40,000 for every home game, Nottingham Forest only 25,000. But instead of giving Liverpool the Kop end, Forest had it due to geographical reasons. This was one of the many mistakes made.
When we got outside the entrance to the Leppings Lane end, the crowds were gathering. The turnstiles were old and decrepit, so access through them was slow. We made our way to one of the queues and waited. Next thing we knew, a mounted policeman opened a huge blue gate, later confirmed as “Gate C”, and ordered my dad to go through there. We did as we were told, expecting to see more, empty turnstiles. To our shock, there weren’t any, we were actually in the Leppings Lane End. Our tickets in hand, still fully intact. Quickly other fans followed us. One of my dad’s mates, Paul, who is 6ft 4ish so hard to miss, headed down towards the central tunnel. We were going to follow him so that we had a good view behind the goal, but everyone seemed to be heading there. Another one of the lads, Gary, shouted Paul back. Gary had been at Heysel stadium 4 years earlier when 39 Juventus fans lost their lives. He said that something wasn’t right, that the last time he felt like that was on the fateful night in Belgium. Instead, we went to the right hand side of the Leppings Lane end, ultimately stopping in one of the side pens midway between the goal and the corner flag. The pen was busy, but nowhere near what we had experienced 12 months earlier. Most fans had headed for the middle pens, so many that they were now holding nearly double their safe capacity.
2:55pm, the players came out to a rapturous welcome. The coin was tossed, Liverpool were defending the Leppings Lane end. The game kicked off, with Liverpool on the front foot as always. A Liverpool throw-in down the right resulted in Peter Beardsley hitting the crossbar. As the ball rebounded off the bar, people coming through the central tunnel surged forward to see what had happened. A crush barrier in one of the middle pens gave way, causing people in the already crowded middle pens to fall over. Over 3000 fans were fenced in with nowhere to go. If Beardsley had actually scored, the crowd would have started to celebrate, jumping up and down, hundreds more would almost certainly have suffered.
The match played on, no-one else in the ground knew properly what was happening in those central pens, not even us in the pen next door. For those trapped, the only way out was over the fences, which had been brought in to make it extremely difficult for fans to climb over, or up to the stand above. As fans called out for help, Bruce Grobbelaar, the Liverpool goalkeeper started to look around to see what was going on. Police started to move in, fearing hooliganism was about to rear its ugly head once again. At 3:06pm, as a few fans made it over the fence to safety on to the pitch, the referee stopped the game and took the players back to the dressing rooms.
The atmosphere suddenly changed. Most of the ground wondered what was going on. The Nottingham Forest fans at the other end of the stadium thought Liverpool fans were causing trouble. They chanted “Heysel” in reference to what had happened 4 years earlier, although to be fair, as it became clear that people were hurt, the Forest fans attitude did change. As more people poured out over the fences, we could tell something was wrong. Fans from the upper stand that sat above the Leppings Lane terrace, started pulling people out of the central pens into the upper tier. The police continued to stand there doing nothing. Ambulance sirens could be heard in the distance, but I only saw one actually make it to the pitch. More fans made it over the fences, pulling the injured out with them.
My eyes wandered around the pitch. Where I expected to see Barnes, Beardsley and Aldridge strutting their stuff, there were now people everywhere. Some were dazed and confused taking deep breathes of air, others were frantically running around, trying to save lives. Advertising hoardings became make-shift stretchers. I can remember seeing a young boy being laid out in the penalty area directly in front of me. He was probably only 10 or 11, around the same age as me. The men with him desperately tried to resuscitate him, but to no avail. One of them placed a coat over his head. I was shell-shocked. My dad and his mates hardly spoke. I don’t think I can remember anybody around us talking.
To the right of where we were standing, in between the Leppings Lane End and Main Stand, was the Stadium control room. Graham Kelly, the then Chief Executive of the FA, walked up the steps to the room to survey what was going on. When spotted, Liverpool fans shouted him to do something, “People are dying in there”. But nothing was done; he looked like a rabbit caught in headlights.
After a while, Kenny Dalglish addressed the fans via the tannoy system, “There has been an accident, Please remain calm”. At 3:30pm the game was officially called off. We left the stadium. Outside ambulances were everywhere. As we walked to the car we could hear people speculating, 5 dead, 10 dead, we couldn’t believe it. When we got in the car and switched BBC Radio on, the full details of what had happened were starting to come through.
Back at my grandparents’ pub, my gran was watching Grandstand, waiting for score updates. When they switched to live coverage from Hillsborough, the panic started to kick in. Quickly she phoned my mum to let her know what had happened. They knew that Dad and I normally got as close to the front as we could, so that I had a good view. They immediately thought the worst. The phone at the pub started ringing constantly, customers who had wished us good luck earlier that day, parents from my youth football team, friends, family, were all phoning to see if we were OK. But mum, gran and grandad couldn’t say we were OK, they didn’t know. They watched Grandstand, and BBC News flashes, praying that they could see we were safe. I’ve never really spoken to my mum about how she felt that day, but it must have been torture.
As we left Sheffield, we knew we had to contact home. With mobile phones unheard of, phone boxes were packed. Locals stood outside their houses with notices “Liverpool fans, phone home”. Some were charging 50p a call, making money out of a disaster. It felt like ages before we finally found a house where there wasn’t a queue of waiting for the phone. Dad pulled over and asked to use the phone. I remember him passing the phone to me to speak to mum. I could hear the relief in her voice.
The rest of the journey home was quiet. With every news bulletin, the number of fatalities grew. By the time we arrived back in Wrexham, the number was in the mid 70’s. When we walked in to our house, mum was relieved to see us, but angry with my dad for taking me, even though I had been to loads of games before. Later that evening, maybe the following morning, dad found out that his mate Steven Brown, the one who made his own way to the match, was one of the fatalities.
Over the next few days, people kept asking if I was OK. I thought I was, though it hadn’t really sunk in what had happened, what I had witnessed. Anfield was opened up as a shrine to the victims. Mum, Dad, me and my 2 brothers all went to pay our respects. We laid a bouquet of flowers on the Anfield pitch, and then walked around the Kop, reading the messages of support from fans of every team in the country. I can remember standing on the Kop, not far from where we would be on a match day, looking out at the flower-covered pitch, at the scarves draped over every barrier, at the hundreds of people who were there, like me, wondering why this had happened. At that point I started to cry.
The local newspaper came round and interviewed Dad and I regarding the tragedy. We were pictured holding our untouched tickets, tickets which we still have to this day. We tried to make sure everybody knew it wasn't LIverpool fans' fault, that too many mistakes had been made by the FA and by the police. Dad arranged a charity football match in the memory of Steven Brown, donating the money to his grief-stricken family.
Three weeks after the tragedy, Liverpool played their first competitive match; fittingly it was away to Everton. The whole of Merseyside came together in a public display of grief, as they did in the most emotional FA Cup final ever one month later. Dad and I went to all the games. I think going to them helped us come to terms with what had happened, helped bring some normality back.
The number of fatalities eventually reached 96. Ninety-six people, who had travelled to watch a football match, but never returned home. During the nearly 22 years since, inquests have taken place to find out what exactly happened on that fateful day, but the truth has never fully come out. Earlier this week, Justice Chiefs have confirmed that all documents relating to the disaster, will be analysed. Hopefully then JUSTICE FOR THE 96 will finally be found.
YNWA
Rob
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