Hillsborough Enquiry....

Further to what I said above...

The fans coming in to the ground had no idea the central pens were full. However, Duckenfield and other senior officials could easily see this from their position in the control centre which overlooked the Leppings Lane terraces. To open the gate and allow thousands more people in to that ******* hell hole is beyond my understanding. It's way beyond incompetence.

There is footage, before the game kicks off, of the cameras setting up and panning around the ground. John Motson, the commentator for the game, is speaking over it. He's testing the mic and talking to the producer and talking about what he expects from the game. He notices that the central pens in Leppings Lane are extremely full and he becomes a bit concerned, but he surmises that the authorities must know what they are doing. If John Motson could see it, why couldn't those in charge? You can only conclude that they could, so why didn't they do something about it?

Unlawful killing is exactly the right verdict. The authorities treated football fans in a way that you wouldn't treat a heard of animals and Hilsborough was the inevitable consequence.

 

Thanks for that Jay. Seems to me then that lack of experience contributed to 99% of the tragedy. I think the folk that tried to get in without a ticket should shoulder some blame on their shoulders too, however you would hope that if they would have know the consequences of their action they would have thought twice. I just hope nothing like this ever happens again.

 

Ah, right! If they could see exactly what was happening in real time like that, then can't imagine what they were thinking opening the gate. To me, the best thing to do would have been dispurse some bobbies outside of the ground and try to thin out the crowds a bit and filter those that didn't have tickets etc...

 

The Sun's Kelvin Mackenzie has apparently apologised.

Bit late.

Also said he only printed the news that his reporters/agents had sent him on that day.


Oh dear.

 

when I look back on those days, I was always a massive fan of standing at games but now I think if it hadn't been Hillsborough something similar would have happened elsewhere.
OK I know there were contributing factors at Hillsborough but at the bigger grounds you always had massive 'ends' behind goals and it was usually the more vulnerable type of fan at the bottom, the youngsters and the elderly who got in early to get a better view. The elderly in particular who often made for the crush barriers to stand and lean on them (instead of in front of them probably because that's what they did at their usual quieter grounds) which then left them open to getting squashed. You then had shall we say the more boisterous ones bouncing up and down at the back ( probably lots of us been there at some stage in our lives) so when the sways happened you had thousands of fans piling forward out of control.
Much of the policing was probably done by people who only experienced these events every now and then, even outside grounds you had panicked rushes at turnstiles for non ticket games where once orderly queues turned into free for alls because somebody started a rumour that, that particular bit was nearly full or the game had started or something.
One of my first experiences of big crowds was at about the age of 14 my mates dad decided we ought to experience a big European game ( telly coverage wasn't up to much in those days) and he took us to a game at Leeds , I remember being under the concourse at the bottom of the steps and looking up towards the entrance to the terracing at a solid wall of folk. I finally made it into the ground proper because of the sheer pressure from behind and for at least 50% of the time my feet were off the floor, we all ended up watching the game on our own after all because you ended up where you ended up! now that can't have been right.
The thing is capacities were crazy in those days when it came to really big games, the theory seemed to be just print as many tickets as possible I can remember being at other grounds where you couldn't move your arms
and it had been like that for a lot of years when you hear tales from (even) older guys telling tales of passing kids down over the crowds heads and such.

 

I remember goin to Ayresome park for Fa cup and thinking ffs this is mental. Also Milmoor walking down side of ground , and I'm sure that wall at the front of away stand collapsed a few times , anybody remember when someone opened the gate into the Ponty and let them West Ham fans in ,chaos people running everywhere fa cup that was.

 

Went to that game with my lad, they had sold the same seats twice in the upper tier. We chose to move to the lower tier. Unbelievable.

 

Totally agree.

2 year inquest concludes 96 people were unlawfully killed and the Liverpool supporters were not to blame.

And still we have posters on this thread peddling the same old lies and mis-information.

 

There isn't actually any evidence of ticketless fans. The point about ticketless fans is anecdotal, that at major events that were oversubscribed some fans without tickets would still turn up. This is important, as it shows that the prevailing assumption was there may be some ticketless fans and therefore it was a known issue the police would need to deal with. In past years this was done so by filtering fans in to the right areas before the Leppings Lane bottleneck and checking tickets. This wasn't done in 1989.

But most importantly the overcrowding wasn't due to excess numbers but a lack of dispersion. It was due to too many people in the central pens. If you have 5 pint glasses and a 5 pint jug of water, and you try and pour 3 pints in to the middle two they will overspill. This is what happened in pens 3 and 4 but there was nowhere to spill out to. People entering the tunnel that led to those pens thought it was the only entrance (it was the only visible entrance on to the terrace with no signposts to the other entrances) and were unaware of what was happening in front. The key point was, even without opening the exit gate the police failure to close that tunnel once the pens were full was already causing risk to life. Having opened the exit door that failure became catastrophic.

The only reason I bring this up is that ticketless fans were discounted as a cause of the disaster as far back as 1991 in the Lord Justice Taylor Report, and have been in any report or inquiry since. Even the crush outside the ground wasn't related to ticketless fans. It was caused by too few turnstiles in a tight bottleneck that could not provide sufficient and quick enough access to process fans who had tickets. This had happened in previous years when the problem had only been resolved through the filtering system leading up to the ground and by the experience and expertise of the previous match commander.

 

Those fans behaved just like a crowd does normally in that situation. Crowds act psychologically in specific ways, they can even be written as mathematical fomulae, those fans were you and me in the same circumstance. They weren't hooligans, or violent psychos or angels even, they were just fans wanting to watch a game of football.

 

**** me. People still believe the lies. I did back in the 90's. I thought the supporters had brought it on themselves.
No they didn't . The were betrayed and their memories besmirched. A shameful episode in British history. I feel a deep sense of shame for believing the media and the authorities.

Read this :

http://www.theguardian.com/football...-deadly-mistakes-and-lies-that-lasted-decades


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

They were happy to print those lies because they believed them, no one else did.

 

Damn right, the same press release would have gone to every editor in the country. Only McKenzie ran with it.

 

This with bells on. Everytime I'd been to Hillsborough you had your tickets checked at a police cordon at the end of Leppings Lane. Slow things down there and stop the bottle necks later on.

I was on Leppings lane when we played Wedneday in the League Cup in Nov 82. I went straight down the tunnel into a crush in the central pen. It was only then that I noticed that there was plenty of space on the corner and moved. There were fewer than 30k there that night and it was a crush. God known what it must have been like on that horrible day.

 

Please watch this

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...-anatomy-of-a-disaster-video?CMP=share_btn_fb


should clear up everything you need to know about that day.