23-10-2023, 21:05
(This post was last modified: 23-10-2023, 21:08 by St Charles Owl.)
(23-10-2023, 17:43)Parisowl Wrote: Agree with 99 percent of this post but just don’t blame the police or anybody else other than the Scousers.
I think they broke down the gates in 88 as well. Not sure of this but that’s what I’ve heard. Encouraged them to come again in 89 with more numbers.
Tried to get tickets for that 89 game to take my 7 year old lad. Luckily I failed. Was planting raspberry plants in the garden and listened on the radio.
Agree the police cocked up afterwards but they didn’t cause the problem.
Problem here is what we define as cause. The police screwed up that day, but not the regular police on the front line, I would never blame them for any of it. The powers that be in the SYP were the ones who replaced the guy who had run security at matches for years and put Duckenfield in charge instead. He had no experience and should not have been in that position in the first place.
One of his decisions was not to put a cordon around the Leppings Lane end so that only those with tickets got to the turnstiles, this was a huge cause of the whole thing.
The problems in 1988 were the pens and the spreading out of the fans, but this was dealt with on the day by the cop in charge by stopping fans using the tunnel. There were problems in 1987 of over crowding at the turnstiles and this is why in 1988 a cordon was used, this was abandoned in 1989 and both the issues they had in 87 and 88 came together.
Other issues in general were also causes of it, we were the only club with pens like those, football fans in general were the cause of having fences in the first place (look at the 1981 semi when overcrowding on that terrace occurred, but no pens or fences and a few spilled onto the perimeter track, another warning not heeded.) and of course the Liverpool fans on the day (and over previous years with the trouble they caused) were also definitely part of the cause. But for me football in general was to blame for it.
I went to 50 games a season home and away during the 80s, you would see these crushes outside and inside grounds week in week out, but we were all lucky as we got away with it but there were a few times where I was more than a bit scared of what was happening. The police tactics were brutal and the term herding cattle applied at every away game. The grounds were all unsafe back then as well, I remember away at Burnley where they crammed us into a terrace or the alley behind Maine Road or at Chelsea when we were in pens after fences went up. Hillsborough in 1989 was the perfect storm of everything we had seen in football during the 70s and 80s!!