YESTERDAY marked the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster and, as a result, I’ve spent much of the past week scouring the archives and researching the events that have occurred since 96 supporters tragically lost their lives in 1989.

There is such heartbreak and suffering involved that it is difficult to think of anything else, but one thing that struck me was the number of Hillsborough survivors who continue to support Liverpool Football Club at every game.

Despite everything they’ve endured and lived through, they cannot bring themselves to turn their back on their football club.

Football has changed markedly since Hillsborough but, as a leisure pursuit, it remains far from perfect.

It is hideously expensive, especially at the highest level, demands incredible flexibility on the part of those who follow it and, while conditions in most stadiums have improved in the past two decades, continues to place its supporters in situations that can be both uncomfortable and dangerous.

Anyone who has followed either their club or country abroad will also know that standards of organisation, policing and stewarding in England are far from universal.

In short, is it really worth the bother? There are plenty who would say ‘No’, and while I’ve generally been able to shout them down in the past, this week’s anniversary caused me to waver for the first time in many a year. Then, on Tuesday night, Liverpool played Chelsea in the quarter-final of the Champions League. Has there ever been a timelier reminder of the enduring beauty of the beautiful game?

As two of the greatest club sides in Europe went at it hammer and tongs in the second half, I remembered why I fell in love with football in the first place.

And as the camera panned to the watching Liverpool fans, some of whom might well have been present at Hillsborough all those years ago, it was easy to work out why they continued to follow their club.

This was what they lived for – the one thing that hauled them out of the darkest corners they had no doubt inhabited since the tragedy and enabled them to get on with their lives anew.

At the precise moment Dirk Kuyt headed Liverpool back into a 4-3 lead, there was nowhere on earth they would rather have been, and it’s unlikely they’ll be able to say the same about too many other moments in their lives. A famous statement once claimed football was more important than life or death and in this week, more than any other, we can unequivocally refute the claim.

But it’s hard not to agree with the sentiment. For those who survived Hillsborough, football, and Liverpool Football Club in particular, has become more, not less, important in the past 20 years.

On one level, the 96 supporters who died at Hillsborough died for nothing. But on another, they died in support of their team. They will never be forgotten, because they are honoured every time Liverpool take to the field without them.

YOU might not have noticed, but yesterday also marked the start of cricket’s County Championship, a competition that increasingly looks like an anachronism amid the brave new world of the Indian Premier League and the Twenty20 World Cup.

Go to any County Championship game this season, and you’ll be greeted by the remnants of a bygone era, but that does not mean there is not a place for the oldest and least commercial form of the game. Speak to the likes of Steve Harmison and Paul Collingwood about their cricketing development, and they will talk glowingly about the importance of playing for Durham in fourday Championship matches.

If Test cricket is to remain the pinnacle of the world game, there must be a breeding ground for players that does not simply involve smashing the cover off the ball. That breeding ground, for all of its imperfections, is the County Championship, and English cricket would be in a much poorer state without it.

TO anyone that followed my advice to back Angel Cabrera at 100-1 last week, I hope my ten per cent commission is in the post.

To anyone who expects an immediate repeat, don’t. It was the first thing I’ve tipped successfully since I took a wheelbarrow of hedge clippings to the compost heap last autumn.

But I feel a need to offer something, so with the World Snooker Championships starting this weekend, I like the look of Shaun Murphy at 14-1.

He’s a former winner in good form and he’ll avoid the big guns before the final.