Today is the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough football disaster that claimed
the lives of 96 Liverpool fans - the families are still fighting for
justice and inquiries as to how their loved ones died. April 15th 1989. You'll never walk alone.
Keeping Alive the Day That Soccer Died
By ROB HUGHES
Published: April 14, 2009
At six minutes past three on Wednesday afternoon the city of Liverpool, the sixth largest in Britain, will stand still.
The silence will last two minutes. It will be at its most intense
inside Anfield stadium at a memorial attended by families and friends
of the 96 men, women and children who were crushed to death at the
start of an English F.A. Cup semifinal on 15 April, 1989 in Sheffield.
The tragedy, the biggest in England?s centuries old sporting culture,
resonated round the world. Those of us who were at Hillsborough stadium
20 years ago are left with a permanent sense of horror and
helplessness. We went to an arena intended for joy, and left it
counting the dead whose only crime was to follow their passion.
Steven Gerrard, the current captain of Liverpool, was 9 years old the
day Hillsborough happened. He will lead his squad of players at the
memorial service ? Liverpool players who were born in Argentina,
Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Italy and Morocco.
?I was still a baby at the time, nine years of age,? Gerrard recalls.
?I couldn?t go to the game, but my cousin did. I remember going to bed
that night, praying that a member of our family hadn?t been involved.
?We got the dreaded knock on the door the next day to say he had died.?
The cousin, Jon-Paul Gilhooley, was 10, Hillsborough?s youngest victim.
Gerrard describes growing up with the way that death affected his
family. And talks of this ?helping to drive me on to the player I am
became.?
That player is known wherever soccer is televised as the captain who
will never give in. He led his team to come back from three goals
behind to beat AC Milan in the Champions League final in Istanbul four
years ago. He is ignoring injury this week, trying to inspire
Liverpool?s first English league title of his career.
With Gerrard it is personal, it is family. Yet only he and defender
Jamie Carragher are Liverpool born among a team hired from the global
pool of talents.
Twenty years ago British stadiums were death traps. Fans were corralled
and penned inside steel fences to prevent them getting onto the field.
The fences had gone up a decade before the Heysel stadium disaster in
Brussels four years earlier. That had also involved Liverpool. Its fans
had chased Juventus supporters, causing a panic and a stampede that
crushed 39 Italians to death beneath a decrepit wall.
Hillsborough forced the authorities to rethink. Britain today has 24
new stadiums, all of them all-seater, all with state of the art closed
circuit surveillance cameras, and all, crucially, with specially
trained stewards and properly vigilant policing.
England has more modern stadiums now than any other nation in Europe, and more than anywhere outside the United States.
Not one of them has the abomination of an immovable metal fence, the
real killer 20 years ago. It gives no succor now to the bereaved of
Liverpool ? or to the score or more people still incapacitated by their
wounds among more than 700 hurt at Hillsborough.
Some relatives still attend every home game, still place fresh flowers
at the shrine to their loved ones, and still carry placards asking for
?Justice for the 96.?
Their grievance is that, despite the conclusion by Peter Taylor that
police failure at Hillsborough amounted to ?a blunder of the first
magnitude? no one was held to account.
?It still hurts just as much,? Trevor Hicks, whose daughters Sarah, 19, and Vicky, 15, died in the catastrophe.
?People say time heals; it doesn?t. You go from raw pain to managed pain. It?ll never be repaired.?
So many parents, so many unanswered questions.
The policy of fencing fans in was stupid, and erecting a steel barrier
in front of 2,000 people with a solitary narrow exit gate was criminal.
That gate sucked people toward their own suffocation.
Two-thirds of the 96 who died were under 30. One of the sacrifices that
the living make is that in England, and anywhere in a UEFA competition,
no one is allowed to stand at a game.
Britain?s prime minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, believed that
compulsory seating would price hooligans out of attending games. It
has. The violence is now in the streets outside. But the high prices
also drove away working class people, the traditional bedrock of
English support.
Rich clubs can charge ?60, or $90, even more for a seat. John Aldridge,
who played for Liverpool in that Hillsborough game, laments on a
television documentary to be screened Wednesday: ?Football died in a
certain way that day. Look at the stadiums, they are fantastic. But
football for that generation just stopped, and we?ve got a different
type of football now.?
It is a higher class of sport, at a price beyond many parents.
Aldridge, like Gerrard a Liverpudlian, visited a hospital the day after
the tragedy and was asked to speak to a comatose child.
?I told the lad who I was and said when he came round I would take him
to Anfield and give him a shirt and we?d have a great day. Afterwards,
I asked the doctor when the lad might come out of his coma. He said
they were switching off his life support that afternoon.
?It absolutely ripped my insides out.?
Liverpool?s community is reliving something they were never in danger
of forgetting. And through television, now as then, the world is
watching.
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