Re: Liverpool Thread
here's a couple of articles written by people who were there, should give you a better insight to what happened
In Memoria e Amicizia
The Horror of Heysel
Strange to think that a few hours earlier we had been playing footy with the Juventus fans in the road outside the stadium. A few hours later we were pulling the bodies of Juventus fans out from under that wall.
I didn’t realise how heavy cement and brick could be. But when a piece of wall is lying across the chest of middle aged man you get an extra strength. You can lift in a way you could never do in any other circumstance.
I couldn’t understand a word his mate said but he was crying and he was leaning on me and sobbing in great chunks of raw emotion. We didn’t know what the hell was happening.
I was at the ground as a radio reporter for a Liverpool radio station covering the match from the terraces. I was picked because I was also a Liverpool fan. My job was to add atmosphere pieces to the commentary from my colleagues in the box high above the pitch.
I had travelled on the train with the rest of the Liverpool fans. I had my carrier bag with clean underwear, a toothbrush and some chocolate and some beer.
We got there early. We played footy in that big dual carriageway outside the ground. The Juventus fans were great fun, we felt close to them in that unique way only European football can create.
For some reason they let us in early – so very early. I think it was about half four in the afternoon when we climbed the crumbling concrete steps to stand on the decaying open terrace that was the Liverpool end of the Heysel Stadium.
It was hot in the uncovered end. And although it is always fun waiting for a match to start, three hours was far, far, far too long.
There was a chicken wire fence separating the Liverpool fans and the Juventus fans in the XYZ section. They had the small bit. Most of their fans, including the dreaded Ultra Force, were behind the other goal on the far side.
We sang our hearts out and got through the whole repertoire before the atmosphere changed.
Rockets, the type you get on bonfire night, were fired into the Liverpool fans. Next to me was a typical Liverpool granny with a knitted bobble hat, a shopping bag with a flask of tea and a dolly dressed in Liverpool’s colours and pinned to her red coat.
She meant no harm yet she was a target. The fireworks rained in on us. Some panicked. The terracing was poor, the concrete was crumbling, the crush barriers too far and few between. I wanted to protect her. But we were tumbling forward and I lost contact.
The only thing separating us from the Juventus fans was a thin strip of what could only be described as wire netting.
The fans got restless, partly through the heat, partly through boredom and partly because they were fed up of being sitting ducks for the fireworks raining down on them.
Then the abuse started. The Juventus fans behind the chicken wire chanting, the Liverpool fans responding.
And all would have been fine had it not been for the police. The rubbish Belgian police who were armed to the teeth but had no bottle.
I was standing next to an undercover Merseyside police officer who I had got to know in those terrible moments as the disaster unfolded.
In those seconds he told me that six Liverpool bobbies could have held the crowd back by linking arms.
Instead the Belgian police with riot gear and clubs ran away from the fans. Yes they actually ran away from the Liverpool fans! What sort of policing is that? You charge the fans with your riot shields, helmets, visors and clubs and then you leg it when the fans turn on you? So what happens then? What happened when a bunch of fans push forward and the police run away? Well it is not bloody rocket science! What happens is the fans keep pushing forward. And what happens when thousands of fans push forward and the only thing separating them from the Juventus fans is chicken wire? Well obviously the chicken wire falls down. And what happens then is that the Juve fans run, the wall falls, people die and the authorities wade in and start to blame.
Nobody wanted death. Nobody wanted to see an Italian hurt. Why oh why did it have to happen? It unfolded like a preordained chapter in a particularly nasty Steven King novel. There was no stopping the event. Looking back it feels like it was slow motion. It was chilling, cold, gut wrenchingly awful. It was a horror movie acted out in slow motion but the difference was that the blood and pain were real.
My dad had died a few months earlier. My wife to be was back home watching it on the TV but, as was the custom, had the sound turned down and the local radio station on for the commentary.
The commentators, my mates, said they had a reporter in the XYZ section but that they hadn’t heard from him. They hoped he would be ok but there was no way I could confirm that. My broadcasting equipment was wrecked and anyway I was too busy helping out.
I crossed the fence and, along with many of the soon to be maligned Liverpool fans, tried to help.
We tore away at concrete, cement and brick with our bare hands. We helped the paramedics drag bodies out of the debris. I had to hug an hysterical Italian woman who had lost a loved one. I had to keep moving, acting, instinctive animal reactions responding to an unfolding nightmare.
And then I was outside by an ambulance and we were walking on to that dual carriageway where we had played footy with the Juventus fans and danced the conga hours earlier.
And as the ambulance drove off the police descended. I saw them running at me. They had long sticks like large bamboo canes. They waded in. They didn’t want to hear what had happened. They wanted to hit and hit hard.
I still have an indentation at the top of my legs where the cane came down. I fell to the ground that the police trampled me under foot.
I had no idea what was going on in the ground. I didn’t care whether the match took place or not. I wanted to make sure all the Italian fans were rescued and that the Liverpool fans were safe.
Then the Ultra Force descended. They were masked with bicycle chains. We ran. An elderly woman wanted my help getting away. We found a railway station, I think it was called Jetta. I seem to remember there was a train to Ostend. It pulled in and left. Dozens of fans got on. I stayed where I was.
More fans arrived, dazed, frightened and traumatized. I got on the next train with them. It was a silent journey. I can remember no more. I can’t remember how I got home, I can’t remember the journey.
I remember a bar in Ostend and someone telling me Juventus had beaten Liverpool 1-0 in the European cup final. I didn’t give a toss.
YNWA Liverpool, YNWA Juventus
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'The Day That Football Died' - Newspaper Headline.
Built in the 1920s, the Heysel Stadium was quite simply the worst venue in the world to host such a volatile encounter. The game was due to be the last match ever played at the ground, as it had been condemned many years previously for failing to meet modern standards of safety and design. As a result, little money had been spent upon it, and large parts of the stadium were crumbling.
There was little segregation of supporters, a factor exacerbated by the indiscriminate selling of black market tickets by touts. Many fans found that it was possible to enter the ground by simply lifting a section of the flimsy fencing that surrounded the terraces. There had been skirmishes around Brussels all day, and local police responded by getting fans into the stadium as quickly as possible, rather than arresting and detaining offenders. This haphazard stewarding of rival fans proved to be crucial as the tragedy unfolded: as there was no way of knowing who was in the ground and where they were, it was impossible for police to weed out known troublemakers, and easy for pockets of hard core hooligans to assemble wherever they wished. As a result, two hours before kick off, perhaps the most malevolent assembly of football supporters ever seen in one place had gathered, and as far as they were concerned, it was payback time. It should be understood that not just Liverpool hooligans were present. There were contingents from a great many firms all over the country, from Luton MIGS to Millwall Bushwackers, West Ham ICF and Newcastle Toon Army. After the events in Rome, club rivalries had been put aside: Juventus were to catch the full fury of the English hooligan elite.
Violence was immediate. Italian fascists, who were present in force among the Juventus contingent, goaded supporters into making incursions into the main body of Liverpool fans, at the Western end of an enormous shared terrace. What were initially scuffles quickly escalated into a series of serious terrace battles. Then, 20:45 local time, something dreadful happened. The Liverpool fans charged into a solid mass of Juventus support, which was hemmed in on three sides by crumbling concrete walls. Unstoppable force had met immovable object.
The Juventus supporters attempted to fall back. However, with no avenue of retreat, they simply piled on top of each other. Panic set in among the Italians, some of whom were now starting to be crushed at the rear of the terrace as the Liverpool supporters continued to charge against the front. At this moment, with police and stewards too stunned to react, a wall at the Eastern end of the terrace gave way. Dozens of Juventus supporters were now trapped against what remained of the wall, and were trampled underfoot as thousands of people stampeded over them. It was at this point that the majority of the deaths occurred.
Meanwhile, there was mayhem in the ground itself. Italian supporters invaded the pitch in an effort to get at the English. All over the stadium violence erupted. It appeared that one Italian fan was firing a gun into the Liverpool fans: this later turned out to be a starting pistol. In desperation, several Liverpool players spoke across the public address system in an attempt to calm the supporters. Eventually, with the arrival of police reinforcements and elements of the Belgian army, enough order was restored for the match to take place. Neither set of players wanted to play. However, it was felt that even more carnage might ensure if rival supporters were allowed to rampage through Brussels. In one of the most meaningless matches ever played, Juventus won 1-0 with a goal by French genius Michel Platini.
The Aftermath
The next morning, flowers were left on the doorsteps of Italian restaurants all over Liverpool. Bemused fans arriving home seemed unable to grasp what they had witnessed. In Brussels, dozens of supporters were quizzed by police, although relatively few custodial sentences were passed. The supporters were described as 'fighting mad' by the Belgian police. One had to be injected with six times the amount of tranquilliser required to knock out a horse in order to calm down enough to be interviewed.
The stadium itself was frightening to behold. Steel crush barriers at the Italian end of the terrace were bent and buckled entirely out of shape, in a grisly testament to the force of the Liverpool charge. It was in many respects fortunate that the wall had collapsed, as it is estimated that had it not done so the death toll could have been many times higher. In an unpleasant twist of fate, Liverpool supporters themselves experienced exactly what happens when force is unable to dissipate four years later, when 96 of their own number were crushed to death as a result of overcrowding at the 1989 FA Cup Semi Final at Hillsborough, England.
Official reaction was swift: English teams were banned from European competition for six years. This damaged the English game as top players, deprived of competing at European level, chose to play on the Continent instead. Also, several smaller clubs, whose domestic performances would otherwise have qualified them for the various European tournaments, missed their chance. Margaret Thatcher and the Queen issued formal apologies to the people of Belgium and Italy. A series of sweeping police anti-hooligan offensives saw several known 'Generals' jailed, although many hooligans simply decided that they had seen enough, and abandoned terrace violence altogether.
As we have seen, there were many reasons why the circumstances surrounding the events of the 1985 European Cup Final arose. Had it not done so at the Heysel Stadium, something similar was bound to have happened somewhere, such was the level of antagonism surrounding English football at the time. Until the Heysel Stadium, the terraces of English football grounds were little more than filthy concrete expanses where tens of thousands of people were literally locked in and left to their own devices for a couple of hours every Saturday afternoon. After Heysel, the authorities were no longer able to dismiss terrace violence as little more than working class lads letting off steam.
Today, many of the huge fan banners on display wherever Liverpool play incorporate a Juventus flag as a mark of respect to the victims of the most shocking night European football has ever seen.
. Although Liverpool have shown some inspiring perfomances in europe this season, quite frankly I thought both scores against Leverkusen were highly flattering and Liverpool did not look nearly as impressive as the score suggested.
