Hillsborough, 15 years later

April 15th, 1989, was one of the biggest days in the English soccer calendar -- the day of the semifinals of the FA Cup.

At Villa Park in Birmingham, Everton was facing Norwich City. Further north at the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, Everton's local rivals Liverpool were to meet Nottingham Forest. The rivalry between Everton and Liverpool, dating back to 1892, had been particularly intense in the middle and late 1980s. The two clubs had been dominating the league championship, and had met in the FA Cup final just three years earlier. Both sets of fans were hoping for a repeat.

By the end of the afternoon, this would be the last thing on anybody's mind.

I went to Birmingham, hoping to see Everton make it through to another final. It was a bright, early spring day. I was standing in the northern end of the stadium, which had been allocated to Everton fans. Opposite, the larger Holte End was a colorful sight, split down the middle, with the blue of Everton on the left and the yellow of Norwich on the right.

At half-time, Everton was 1-0 ahead, thanks to a rare goal from winger Pat Nevin. Confident that they were on their way to the final, we were keen to hear about what was happening in the other semifinal.

But something was wrong. The announcer, in what turned out to be a gross understatement, said that the game in Sheffield had been delayed because of "overcrowding" on the terraces.

As the half-time break went on, rumors began to spread among the Everton fans. There was, apparently, more going on than a bit of overcrowding -- people were talking about how many Liverpool fans were dead. Dead? Could this really be happening?

When the second half began, everybody seemed to stop talking about Hillsborough. Maybe none of us truly believed what we had been hearing, because we didn't want to believe it. We just wanted to block it out of our minds, and focus on the game being played in front of us.

Everton held on to their 1-0 lead. At the end of the game, the players celebrated wildly. They hadn't been told anything about the events unfolding in Sheffield, and must have been wondering why we were greeting them with little more than polite applause and half-hearted cheers.

As we filed away from Villa Park, there was an eerie hush, as we began to face the horrendous reality of what had happened.

***

So what exactly did happen, and why? A number of factors contributed to the disaster. First, although it was clear that they would outnumber the Nottingham Forest fans, Liverpool's supporters were allocated a smaller share of tickets for the game. Many fans, desperate to get in, showed up without tickets and hoped for the best. Second, because of roadworks, a large number of Liverpool fans were badly delayed on their way to the game.

Add to this a combination of poor organization by police and stadium staff, faults with the stadium's construction and layout, the fans' eagerness to see the kick-off -- and there was a recipe for disaster.

In the half hour before the game began, chaotic scenes were developing outside the Leppings Lane end of the stadium, a standing-only section where thousands of Liverpool fans were trying to get in through just seven turnstiles.

In an attempt to relieve the crush, a steward opened a large gate, letting fans pour inside, with or without tickets. Instead, the problem was simply transferred from the outside of the stadium to the inside. Although those fans who went through the open gate were later criticized for arriving so late, it was the people at the front of the terracing, some of whom had been waiting calmly for an hour or more, who would bear the brunt of the consequences.

As the game kicked off, the chaos was escalating. Fans at the front, trapped between the surging mass of bodies behind them and the tall cage-like fence in front of them, were crushed -- many of them fatally.

The game was suspended, and eventually abandoned, as terrified fans tried to clamber over the fence to save their own lives. Some were pushed back over the fence by the police. In the frantic rescue operation, advertising hoardings were used as makeshift stretchers.

The final death toll was 96. Over 400 others were injured.

***

In the days that followed, there was a storm of anguish and grief, accusations and recriminations. Some of the international media, notably in the USA, reported the event as an outbreak of violence -- an easy conclusion for lazy journalists to reach, given the past actions of some English soccer fans, but it bore no relation to the truth.

The response of the British media was hardly any better. In some cases it was even worse. The Sun, Rupert Murdoch's trashy, lowest-common-denominator daily tabloid, ran a front-page story headlined -- wait for it -- "The Truth." It claimed that fans had stolen money from, and even urinated on, the dead bodies, and that they had attacked rescue workers. It provoked a furious reaction, and a boycott of The Sun, in the Liverpool area. Fifteen years later, its sales in the area still haven't recovered, and some local newspaper outlets refuse to stock it.

Later it emerged that the source of these unfounded allegations was a member of the South Yorkshire Police, the local force responsible for policing in Sheffield. Other newspapers also pointed the finger of blame at the fans, quoting directly from the police, without questioning their honesty or their motives.

Gradually, though, the media began to realize that this was a massive human tragedy, and that questions had to be asked. Could the police have done more to prevent it? Who told the steward to open that gate? Would lives have been saved if the Leppings Lane end had been all-seated? Relatives of the victims formed a campaigning group to look for answers.

According to Lord Justice Taylor, who led an inquiry into the deaths, "The real cause of the Hillsborough disaster [was] overcrowding, the main reason for the disaster was the failure of police control."

One major talking point was the effect of the fence at the front of the terracing. Fences such as this had been installed in most English stadiums in the 1970s to prevent field invasions. But, in this case, the fence trapped people who desperately needed to get out of the crush. Without it, there might not have been any fatalities. Lord Justice Taylor's report recommended that the fences should be taken down, and that all stadiums at the highest levels of the game in England must be all-seated.

Meanwhile, Liverpool were thrown into turmoil by the disaster. Games were postponed. Players and coaching staff attended funerals of the victims. After two weeks, they returned to action with an emotionally-charged game at, of all teams, Everton. The 0-0 tie was, perhaps, the only conceivable result.

They won the rescheduled semi-final in Manchester (a return to Sheffield was out of the question), and went on to beat Everton by 3-2 in the final at Wembley Stadium in London, on yet another day of high emotions. But the season ended in heartbreak for them -- they were beaten to the league championship by Arsenal, as fate (and possibly the influence of an opportunistic TV network) had resulted in the two title contenders meeting each other in the last game of the season, one of the games that had been postponed in the wake of the tragedy.

The great Liverpool-Everton rivalry took on a different character in the aftermath of Hillsborough, as the whole city was united in grief. In time, it would get back to something approaching its old intensity, but no sports rivalry can overshadow the horrific deaths of 96 people.

***

The image of soccer in England would change dramatically over the coming years. In retrospect, this can be traced back to the Hillsborough disaster. Politicians and the media began to see soccer fans as human beings, with human rights -- not as a menace to society.

The following year, half of England's population watched on TV as the national team came agonizingly close to reaching the World Cup final. Suddenly, positive images of fans were appearing on the front pages of newspapers. A few months later, Margaret Thatcher, who seemed to regard the game as some kind of social disease, was replaced as Britain's prime minister by John Major, an unashamed Chelsea fan. Next came Tony Blair's government, which launched a "Football Task Force" with the intention of looking after the interests of fans.

Ironically, one person who capitalized on the game's new veneer of respectability (and the marketability that came with it) was that man Mr Murdoch. In 1992, his satellite TV company, Sky, was instrumental in the launch of the Premiership. This was basically a rebranding of the old First Division of the four-division Football League, but as a separate entity, and without the bothersome obligation to share TV revenues with the clubs in the lower divisions. Since the Premiership began, Sky has always had exclusive rights to live TV coverage of its games, funded largely by millions of satellite TV subscriptions. It was, and still is, Sky's biggest selling point.

The Sky deal brought unprecedented amounts of money into the top level of English soccer, and was a huge boost for the company itself. Many believe that it saved Murdoch's News Corporation empire, including FOX and numerous other media outlets around the world, from collapse.

In just three years, News Corporation had gone from portraying soccer fans as depraved, inhuman thugs, to embracing them and fleecing them for every penny they could get out of them.

On a more positive note, the influx of money has allowed clubs to implement Lord Justice Taylor's recommendations to develop their stadiums into all-seated facilities, with far more emphasis on safety and comfort than before. It's hard to imagine a similar disaster taking place today. A victory for the rampant capitalism and cynicism of Rupert Murdoch may be hard to swallow, and the rises in ticket prices have driven many long-standing fans away from the game, but nothing could be worse than another Hillsborough.

For more about the Hillsborough disaster, and the ongoing campaign for awareness of the truth behind the tragedy, visit the Hillsborough Justice Campaign web site: http://www.contrast.org/hillsborough/home.shtm