by Amy Lawrence
So there you have it. The residents of S6 are the silent witnesses to what happened on 15 April 1989.
This is my truth of what I saw and heard that day, nothing more, nothing less.
ALAN DAVIES:
On the day of 15 April Arsenal played Newcastle at home and we were going for the title and it was a big day. In those days the semi-finals were played at 3 o’clock on a Saturday just like all the league games were. I used to go on my own and stand in the north-west corner of the North Bank and I’d quite often take a little radio. Loads of people had a little pocket transistor, especially if something was happening like the cup semi-finals, which were a huge deal. The Cup Final is the biggest game of the season and so I had the thing to my ear and so people would say, what’s the score, mate? Any scores? All the time. But word was coming through that there was something going on and the Liverpool match had been stopped. The immediate reaction was there must have been crowd trouble because there was a lot of crowd trouble in the 80s.
Then it came through that someone had been killed. One person. And it changed the whole atmosphere on the terrace. By the end of the afternoon, by full-time, we won the game 1–0. Marwood scored. It was another three points, you know. We were going for the league but the whole atmosphere in the ground was strange. People knew that something was going on but they didn’t know what and by the end of the game the word was that seven people had been killed, which seemed like the most appalling tragedy you could think of. Little did we know what was unfolding.
NICK HORNBY:
I was at Highbury. It started to come through on people’s radios that something had happened. I don’t think I knew precisely what had happened until I got home afterwards and turned on the TV. I don’t think anyone in the ground knew a lot of people had died. I remember the Ibrox disaster when I was a teenager and you just couldn’t see how they could keep doing this. Herding tens of thousands of people into spaces which were basically concrete steps with a bit of fencing at the bottom. Arsenal weren’t allowed to host a semi-final because they wouldn’t put fences up and it was the fences that killed people. A few years before, I’d ended up going on the pitch because there was a riot behind me in the North Bank. It was West Ham fans and everyone surged forward and ended up going on to the playing surface and the referee called the game off. I was standing in the penalty area waiting for a corner to come over. We were taken down the other end where there was a bit more room. I think there was that sense of – I think we all had it – that could have been us. You look back on all the times when you feel you might have been crushed and somehow there was always this sense that someone knew what they were doing. Of course, no one knew what they were doing. It was all desperately unsafe and, of course, we’ve found out loads of things about the police behaviour and so on since. The biggest problem with what happened at Hillsborough was the way that we watched football. It was uncontrollable.
BOB WILSON:
It was a cup tie, Liverpool versus Nottingham Forest, and Des Lynam was the number one presenter at Grandstand but he was presenting from Hillsborough that day. I used to fill in for Des so it fell upon me to be in the chair on that day on Grandstand. Five hours, no script, and we were going between the world snooker at the Crucible and the semi-final at Hillsborough. That was basically the content of the programme. Very soon after we’d gone on air it became clear that we had to go to Hillsborough. In my ear I was hearing there’s something dreadful happening. Then we got the information through and I’m hearing a lot that the people at home didn’t hear. The producers of the programme and then the head of sport came on to me and said to me, ‘Bob, do you realise there are bodies there?’ It was only towards the end of the programme they said: be very careful in what you’re going to say. I had no idea that it was going to be 96 lives lost ultimately. I remember coming up with the words: ‘If you’re really concerned with your loved ones if they’re at the game, this is the number to ring.’ That was all I was allowed to do at that particular time before we went off air. We had no idea of the eventual horrific situation. We came off air and we always used to go for a drink and I think most people had a bit of a cry. I heard the news just afterwards and the numbers were rising with the next news bulletin. We knew that Downing Street was in on it. I went home and had a good cry.
How can you go to a football game, how can you go to any great entertainment, and lose 96 lives? For football it was a defining moment. There was no question that it made the authorities sit down and say, look, what are we going to do here? How did this happen? How did they allow so many people into there? How did the crush develop? Why did they not listen to Bruce Grobbelaar, who was so close to it in goal and was screaming: ‘Open the gates.’ I’m sure a lot more people would have survived if they’d listened to Bruce’s screaming because he knew that people were losing their lives in there.
JOHN LUKIC:
In football stadiums you pick up things off supporters. You can pick up vibes and that probably sounds strange but there was definitely a sombre mood as our game against Newcastle went on. It got a little bit more subdued and more subdued and more subdued and then at the end you get to find out what actually happened. Sport doesn’t mean anything when it comes to life.
TONY ADAMS:
It’s obviously devastating. It’s hard to understand and to empathise with the horrific thing that happened on that day. It was beyond comprehension. I can only imagine how the players there were feeling. It must have been absolutely horrific for everybody involved. Unless you’re there and having that experience you can’t understand the pain of what happened.
LEE DIXON:
I think we’d all played in games in our careers where there’d been crowd trouble and people getting on the pitch. So it was always in the back of your mind that some trouble might happen. You’re always aware of the crowd. People always say to me, do you hear the crowd? Do you hear what people say? You hear a lot. You block a lot of it out because you’re concentrating but it comes in and out of your consciousness. After the game more and more information comes out and I just remember when the shock of what happened came out thinking, that’s it. The season’s over. I genuinely believed that it wouldn’t carry on. Why would you? Ninety-six people have lost their lives. Why would you carry on playing football? That was my initial thought, not as a footballer but as a person. Football was just irrelevant then at that point. Quite rightly so there was a real concentration on the relatives of the people who had lost their lives and football didn’t matter.
ALAN SMITH:
I watched our game from the paddock because I was injured. I had a depressed fracture of the cheekbone from a collision with one of the youth team players in a training ground match. I’d headed the ball and he’d come and headed my cheek and it had all caved in. The paddock was the area behind the dugout where some of the youth team players and those not involved would sit. At half-time I went up to the halfway house, which was the old players’ lounge just halfway up the tunnel there on the right and I saw some of the scenes unfolding at Hillsborough and reports that people were injured. I went up to the dressing room and said to the lads, oh there’s trouble at Hillsborough. They reckon there’s crowd trouble and people have been hurt. But they’re obviously thinking about the match and the second half. We won the game against Newcastle and then I went back up and told them more. Stories were coming in all the time of deaths and it was an awful, awful day and it got worse as the night went on. Everybody went home and watched News at Ten. Just awful.
NIALL QUINN:
What I won’t forget is going down to the halfway house after the game to find out what happened in Sheffield, knowing that I had got two tickets for that game for friends of mine who were Liverpool fans. It is something I can never shake off. That moment of fear. I didn’t find out until my mother heard the news the next day that they were OK. I remember the journalists being there for interviews just outside the halfway house and I said, it’s not a day for talking about the f
ootball. Everybody packed up their notebooks and went away. It was dreadful. Steve Burtenshaw scouted at the game as we were due to play Liverpool shortly after. I remember speaking to him two weeks later and he just started crying. It was tough stuff. It was a time that went on to change the game but it was such a dark, terrible time. Football can never afford to forget those who died.
NIGEL WINTERBURN:
I remember putting the television on and seeing those scenes. It’s so difficult to describe. It absolutely makes you feel numb. I can still see it now. I can still picture that end at Hillsborough. I can still see all those supporters. Some of them being pulled up. Some of them being pushed over the top. The ambulances come in. People ripping up the hoardings. Stretchering people away. That just can’t happen at a game of football. But it did. Sitting here thinking about it now is upsetting. I don’t think you realise what has happened really internally unless you’re part of Liverpool Football Club. It’s impossible. We don’t understand. It’s so hard to talk about. So I don’t know how they carried on after that. Maybe they felt that they had to as a mark of respect. You’ve got to somehow block it out but it’s there.
JOHN LUKIC:
You understood the enormity of what had actually happened and for that to have happened in a football stadium on a day which should have been a joyous day, it’s just one of those days that sticks in your memories. For all those poor families that suffered losses. It was a very, very sobering experience to go through. It didn’t directly involve us but it did from a footballing fraternity point of view. It does rip you to your core to see events unfold as they happened on the TV, it’s just beyond belief and to think that there has not been any conclusion to that until recently and even ongoing now. It’s just unbelievable because it’s so long ago.
DAVID DEIN:
We had a television in the boardroom and just seeing the pictures coming through from Hillsborough was chilling. Nobody really knew what was going on and how serious it was until afterwards. It was only as the story unfolded that we realised what a tragedy that was. Not just for English football but it was a wake-up call for everybody around the world. Two of the girls who sadly lost their lives went to the same school as my daughter, Haberdashers’ in Elstree. I was on the Football League Management Committee at the time and I offered to speak to the parents. I live locally and asked, do you mind if I just pop round and see you and just talk it through? This was only a few days after the event. They said, please do, so I ran around to see them. It was terribly sad hearing their stories about their daughters who went to the game and they never saw them again alive.
NICK HORNBY:
Looking back on it now I think I feel a little bit ashamed that I gave it two weeks like everybody else. There was no football for two weeks and then we played Norwich on a Bank Holiday Monday and won 5–0 and the sun was out. We can get back on with it now. But it probably wasn’t right in the same way that it wasn’t right that we all watched the game after Heysel in 1985. They just kicked off and played it and looking back at that I feel a bit kind of unclean. Why didn’t we all just turn the TV off? Why didn’t they stop the game? There are lots of arguments to say that football shouldn’t have continued but there we are. I think there was probably a sense also in a bad way of, well, it’s football fans, isn’t it? They’re always hurting each other. So I think there was probably a sad reason that it was off in its bubble.
ALAN DAVIES:
At Highbury, we used to have semi-finals. Tottenham played a semi-final at Highbury. I remember West Brom and Ipswich playing a semi-final and it was quite a good thing for the club. It felt good that your ground was worthy of it and we had a big capacity with the terraces. But they said, if you want to continue staging semi-finals at Highbury you’ve got to put fences up around the pitch, and the club refused to do it and the reason they refused to do it was common sense. Because in the early 80s there used to be a lot of trouble, especially at London derbies, with fans going on to the home fans’ terrace and trying to take the terrace. So you’d try and take the Shelf. Take the Shed End. Or take the North Bank at Highbury. So you’d sometimes get fighting and then the police would wade in and that was terrifying and they’d batter everyone and that was your afternoon. Once West Ham appeared on the terrace and a smoke bomb went off in the middle of the North Bank and the police waded in, cracking heads with truncheons, which made a sort of pop sound that was weird and everyone was running and you’re trying to run away and you don’t know which way to run and there’s smoke everywhere and people poured on to the pitch. Hundreds of people went on the pitch to get away from the smoke. Now, had they had fences who knows what would have happened on that day. It was panic. They had games at Hillsborough because it had fences and the fences killed all those people and whoever was responsible for putting fences around football grounds and caging people in should be held to account and hopefully will be finally. The fences killed all those people. I can remember at so many grounds being up against fences. I used to like standing at the front, especially when I was a kid. Being up against the fence. Being crushed from behind. It’s frightening and everyone felt it that day. It was after that they started taking the fences down.
NIGEL WINTERBURN:
Blaming Liverpool supporters and then the police are covering things up. When I think about that it sends me cold. It makes me shudder after all this time.
PAUL MERSON:
I won PFA young player of the year that year. I had to go and pick my award up that weekend at the Grosvenor Hotel. I didn’t want to go. It was the most horrible thing I have ever seen I think in football. Ever. I won probably the best award you could ever win as a youngster and I didn’t want it. Football had gone out of the window for me then. I don’t like talking about it now if I’m being honest. It was so sad.
AMY LAWRENCE:
The impressions of that day have never gone away. Anyone who loved football then felt it, still feels it, whenever those images come up. As they have done for all these years, all those anniversaries, as the families of the 96 have shown such remarkable endurance in pursuit of some kind of justice. That day, in its immediacy, it was too much to comprehend. Without the rolling news of our contemporary world, without social media and cameras on mobile phones, it was just a case of sticking together and waiting for the next news bulletin. Nobody wanted to be by themselves. Our little band of friends, teenagers, who had gone excitedly to a game that day able to afford it with their pocket money, just like 37 of the 96 did who were still in their teens, left our usual spot on the North Bank and went home to Matt’s house. Nobody had any words, as we absorbed each news update and the number of dead kept rising. It felt like the world as we knew it was caving in.
EIGHT
Football Focus
ALAN SMITH:
There was a question, there was a doubt at one stage, whether the season would be abandoned. We had a break. The gaffer said, ‘We’re going to pay our respects and we just want to make sure we stay fit for when football does resume.’ When things were finally decided our match against Liverpool was put to the end of the queue because we were supposed to play them during that period where the matches were postponed. It was just an awful time. Back in the day when there were terraces we used to see that surge forward and you’d think, oh, look at that, and you’d never really worry about the safety aspect of it. You just took it as a part of football and obviously, things changed totally after that and rightly so.
LEE DIXON:
I think a lot of people were looking at Liverpool going, what do we do? What’s acceptable? Whatever you do we’ll do. The way they conducted themselves, their players, Kenny Dalglish in particular, and the way that Liverpool as a club dealt with the aftermath was sensational, if that’s the right word. It was just so humbling to watch them deal with that from a distance.
PAUL MERSON:
First of all what those Liverpool players did was phenomenal. After what happened they just kept on winning and winning and win
ning, just brushing everybody aside. They could have easily gone the other way and they didn’t. They could have folded and they didn’t. They showed unbelievable strength.
NIGEL WINTERBURN:
I don’t know how they carried on after that. Emotionally I cannot think about what they were going through. Maybe they felt that they had to as a mark of respect. I don’t think you really realise what has happened unless you’re part of Liverpool Football Club. It’s impossible. For us? You’ve got to get out and get on and do the job that you’re being paid to do as well. When my kids were around I always said I was going to work. It was a job. It was a job that I absolutely loved. It is horrible to say it but you’ve got to block out what’s happened and get on with the job that you’re supposed to do. At the time our job was to try and be league champions.
LEE DIXON:
You do get on with it and it’s a relief because you don’t then have to deal with what’s really going on as a human being. Football is an escape for the players. Because we were competing with them it felt a little bit weird. A little bit wrong at the time. What’s everybody thinking? Do they want us to win it? What’s the right thing? Somebody tell me what the right thing to do is. It was all really surreal.