Hillsborough: 25 Years Later

This Wednesday marks the 25th Anniversary of one of the worst tragedies in sports- the Hillsborough Disaster.   I wasn't really paying attention to the Premier League (or the First Division as it was then known) at the time, but the death of 96 people changed sports in the UK forever- especially when it came to stadium design. (Every stadium in the UK are now all-seater stadiums, prior to Hillsborough many had terraces where fans could stand.)

Every Premier League game (and the Welsh Premier League, FA Cup and the other eight divisions in English Football) this weekend started seven minutes late to mark the Anniversary- one minute of silence for those that died and six minutes late, because the FA Cup Semifinal between Nottingham Forest and Liverpool was halted six minutes into the game once the crowd began spilling onto the pitch and the police began to realize the magnitude of the problem that was developing at that end of the field.

Watching the match footage, randomly found on YouTube is chilling.   It just seems like a normal, regular football match but as you watch the minutes tick by, the occasional glance and flick of the camera to that end of the pitch shows that something is happening- but nobody realizes how desperate the situation is- how people are already fighting for their lives.

But the old saying with this tragedy holds very, very true:  the cover-up was, in many ways, worse than the crime.  An hourlong documentary on the Beeb shows that there was insufficient police presence on hand for crowd control and it took a criminally long time for ambulances to arrive on the scene.  But in the late 80s, after a decade of English soccer hooliganism, it was all too easy for the police to blame the fans rather than admit fault in the tragedy.

25 years later and many still want Justice For The 96.

I've always been somewhat agnostic about Liverpool F.C.  They never had the same annoying bandwagoning fans that Manchester United seemed to attract in droves, thanks to David Beckham's six pack- but I've never had any reason to dislike them.  (I mean, obviously, when they play Arsenal and beat them I'm less than enthused.)  But today, I'm a Liverpool fan.  Today, everyone should be a Liverpool fan.