The fight for justice goes on

ON the morning of Saturday, April 15, 1989, about 24,000 Liverpool supporters travelled to Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium to watch their side in an FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest. Ninetysix of them would never return.

The effects of Britain’s worst sporting disaster have been profound, transforming the face of football and ushering in a new era, in which supporters are housed in all-seater stadia rather than herded onto terraces surrounded by tenfoot metal spikes.

But the costs of that change were immense, and as the sporting world gathers today to mark the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, the price that was paid to drag football into the modern day will be horribly apparent.

It will be there in the list of the 96 dead, half of whom were 21 or younger. It will be there in the faces of the 800 people who were injured.

And it will be there in the minds of others who have seen their lives ripped apart.

Britain owes each and every one of the affected a massive debt of thanks. Without their sacrifice, there would have been no Premier League, no attractive new stadia enabling families to reclaim the national sport, and no end to the mob rule that had blighted football for much of the previous decade.

“People forget what it was like watching football back then,” said former Newcastle player Peter Beardsley, who was a member of the Liverpool team 20 years ago, and who still finds it difficult to talk about the tragedy.

“I remember, as a lad, watching Newcastle at St James’ Park being in some uncomfortable situations with the crowd all packed in tightly.

Grounds today are a lot safer. So at least something positive came from a great tragedy.”

But the “reward” for those affected has been two decades of obfuscation, buck-passing and, occasionally, downright dishonesty. No one has been charged with any offence as a result of what happened at Hillsborough, and no one has even lost a day’s pay to acknowledge the mistakes that contributed to the tragedy.

At the time, drunkenness, hooliganism and violence were put forward as explanations for what happened, with The Sun, the South Yorkshire Police and UEFA president Jacques Georges quick to blame Liverpool supporters.

Their account has subsequently been thoroughly discredited, with Lord Justice Taylor, the Gosforth-born judge who wrote the official report into the disaster, blaming the police.

The Hillsborough tragedy unfolded in three parts. The first saw thousands of Liverpool supporters, who were congregating outside the Leppings Lane end of the ground, ushered into two central pens that were already dangerously overcrowded. With the game kicking off as thousands of fans entered the stadium, a wall of bodies hurtled towards the fences at pitch level.

Swept along a narrow tunnel by the growing swell behind them, supporters ploughed down the terrace, unaware that people were dying underneath them.

Adrian Tempany, a survivor, who was 19 when he attended the match, described his experiences in a recent series in The Observer.

“As the seconds ticked down, my lungs began to falter,” he said. “I screwed up every ounce of strength left in my body – to lever myself into the air, climb on to someone’s shoulders, escape.

But as I heaved and strained, my body wouldn’t move an inch.

“Those pressed tight around me were heavy, some were unconscious; others were gibbering, trying to black out what was happening.”

By the time the referee called the players from the field at 3.06pm, it was already too late to save many of those in the crush. But with proper medical support, some of the dying could have been rescued. Instead, what happened next formed part two of the tragedy.

In their control room above the Leppings Lane end, the police were convinced they were witnessing football hooliganism. So instead of doing everything they could to get the supporters off the terrace, they initially did everything to keep them on it. The perimeter gates remained locked and when two supporters clambered over the fence on to the pitch, police moved in with dogs to “restore order”.

When the gates were eventually opened and hundreds of seriously-injured supporters spilled off the terrace, the police formed a wall across the halfway line to prevent fighting between rival fans.

Half an hour after the players left the pitch, a solitary ambulance made its way towards the Leppings Lane end. Forty-one remained outside the stadium. They were instructed not to enter because the official police line was that supporters were fighting and it was too dangerous to go on the pitch.

Tony Edwards, the only professional ambulance man to reach the Leppings Lane end, said: “There was no fighting. The survivors were deciding who was the priority, who we should deal with. Can you imagine a rail accident where all the ambulances wait on the embankment while survivors bring the casualties up?”

The pain that engulfed the city of Liverpool must have been unimaginable, but it was exacerbated by a need to defend those who had died.

UEFA President Jacques George branded them “beasts waiting to charge into the arena”.

FA chief executive Graham Kelly told the media that the policeman in charge had accused Liverpool supporters of kicking down an exit gate and flooding the terraces. The Sun’s front page spoke of Liverpool fans “urinating on the brave cops” and “viciously attacking rescue workers as they tried to revive victims”.

LORD Taylor’s report, which described the Liverpool supporters’ attempts to save the dying as “magnificent” and was unequivocal in its criticism of the police, helped redress the balance, but the inquests, held before a coroner employed by Sheffield council, delivered verdicts of accidental death.

Crucially, the coroner imposed a 3.15pm cutoff time, ruling that every victim would have been brain-dead by that stage and therefore absolving the police of blame for anything that happened after that point.

The Director of Public Prosecutions threw out all charges against the police on the grounds of insufficient evidence. A disciplinary investigation into Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, the officer in charge, was stopped when he took early retirement on medical grounds.

Fourteen police officers who were traumatised by the events received £1.2m in compensation.

The families of the dead received nothing.

“Till the day you die, you have got to get an answer,” said John Aldridge, who was a member of the Liverpool team. “You’ve got to keep banging whatever drums are in front of you, to keep it going. Because it should never have happened.

“You go on a lovely April day to watch the semi-final of the FA Cup and your loved ones don’t come home. I’ll tell you what, if that happened to my son I would still be unearthing whatever I can to find some answers.”