Shame, Truth and Justice

I think I was about 6 or 7 when I was taken to my first live football match. It was a late summer's evening and the venue was Newlandsfield Park, home of Pollok Juniors.

I can only speculate at the number of games I've seen since then, but it will run well into four figures.

Among those games there have been some great ones, some awful ones and others that have long since vanished from my memory.

One recurring theme from them all is the fact that I went home safe and well afterwards.

Ninety six Liverpool fans who attended their fixture with Nottingham Forrest on April 15^th 1989 didn’t.

Life is fragile and the unfortunate by product of that is tragedy. You shouldn’t, however, end up dead through doing nothing more sinister than attending a football match. You just shouldn’t.

I can, thankfully, only imagine what the events of April 15^th 1989 must have been like for the families of those that died at Hillsborough.

Concern when news of events at Hillsborough first started to filter through. Fear when it became clear just serious it was. And then grief, mind numbing grief, when they learned that their husband, son or daughter was one of those that wasn’t coming home from this football match.

And anger too.

There’s anger with any sudden death. There’s an overwhelming sense of it being, for want of a better phrase,  just not fair. Why my loved one.

There’s a desire too to find someone to blame. Someone must be to blame, mustn’t they? These things don’t just happen.

Imagine then, if you can, when still numbed with grief you are told that those to blame were the 96 dead themselves and their fellow Liverpool supporters.

Within days of the disaster the myths started to grow.  Fuelled by a government who viewed football  fans as an underclass. Who viewed them as merely a public order issue.  Herd them along, pen them in like cattle, with things like comfort and safety very much a minor consideration; assuming they were considered at all.

You attend a football match? Then you must be a drunken thug who deserves to die.

Okay, The Sun newspaper didn’t quite the print the above but their words weren’t that far removed from it.

Their front page banner headline declared ‘The Truth’. A ‘truth’ that had Liverpool fans urinating on the police, pick pocketing the dead and pinned the blame for the disaster firmly and squarely on the shoulders of the Liverpool fans.

Their ‘truth’ was nothing more than a vicious smear that served only to convict the Liverpool fans in the eyes of popular opinion.

Even though the Taylor Report, published in August 1989, sited a failure of police control as the primary cause of the disaster public perception has remained that the Liverpool fans had to be in some way responsible for the disaster.

It is to be hoped that the report compiled by the Hillsborough Independent Panel, published today, will 23 years on finally redress that perception. Hopefully now the extent of the police’s failings and blatant cover up will be known and there for all to see.

The findings of the Hillsborough Independent Panel will not have come as surprise to the families of the dead. Nor to anyone whose knowledge of events prior, during and subsequent to the disaster has been gleaned from a source other than this nation’s disgraceful tabloid press.

Today then wasn’t the culmination of the search for the truth, but rather an official confirmation of it. Twenty three years is a long time to wait for that confirmation. Hopefully the wait for the justice that should inevitably follow will not be as long in coming.