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Why I think Hillsborough still matters
Posted 31 Jul 2009 at 09:42 PM by Dan Loney
Updated 03 Aug 2009 at 05:32 PM by Dan Loney (A couple of inclarities (is that even a word?); violated the same words/clause in the same paragraph rule a couple of times; some good old fashioned spelling errors)
Updated 03 Aug 2009 at 05:32 PM by Dan Loney (A couple of inclarities (is that even a word?); violated the same words/clause in the same paragraph rule a couple of times; some good old fashioned spelling errors)
One of the most troubling things about the reactions to the Cohen boycott is the misunderstanding of what the Hillsborough disaster actually meant. There are two fundamentally incorrect reactions to the topic. Let me take two examples from Ollie's most recent comment thread.
Both "It was a long time ago" and "******** Liverpool" are understandable reactions. If we were talking about European Cups of the 1980's, they would be almost unanswerable.
But Hillsborough wasn't about Liverpool. It was about soccer fans.
Hell, it wasn't really about soccer. It was about what happens when owners and promoters look down on their audiences. Just like, to pick one example, what happened to Who fans in 1979. By the 1980's, football fans in England were seen as the dregs of society.
You look at the Premier League today, and it's unthinkable that games used to be played in substandard facilities to audiences considered a couple of steps below pond scum. But this isn't a coincidence. The reaction to the Taylor Report in the 1990's wasn't about hooliganism or Liverpool. It was about stadiums. Remember, in 1989, Hillsborough was still one of the best facilities in England. That's why it was picked for an FA Cup semifinal in the first place. The fact that such a decrepit stadium was deemed suitable for such a match shows how moribund and slothful the game had become.
Nowadays, of course, the English game is rich and happy, and a powerful favorite to host a World Cup. If you look at 1989 through a 2009 prism, of course Hillsborough doesn't make sense. But between 1966 and 1989, there were greater profits to be made through inertia than through improvements. The longer things went unchanged, the greater the risk. A disaster was inevitable, it was just a matter of who and where.
For the technical aspects of what went wrong, you can read "Hillsborough for Dummies."
Which is why blaming Liverpool fans is doubly asinine.
Technically, this is Arguing From Authority, but Nick Hornby at least was in England at the time.
Hornby quotes The Economist's contemporaneous article a few pages later, further damning the powers that were.
For an Arsenal fan, Hornby is soft on Liverpool fans throughout "Fever Pitch," to be fair. But it's hard to fault his logic, or his facts. Earlier in the book, he himself was an unwilling pitch invader at Highbury, because of precisely the sort of incident that happened in 1989. The disastrous difference was perimeter fencing in Hillsborough.
Again, that reads like an archaeology textbook now, because the Football League has been elbowed aside in favor of the Premier League. Do you think all those changes would have come about if the only problem that caused Hillsborough were Liverpool drunks? This is history now, but not ancient history. There's no excuse for not knowing this stuff.
Which brings us to the Taylor Report. Speaking for myself, I've had a neckful of people impeaching the Taylor Report without answering any of the specifics of the report. Comparisons to the Warren Commission or the 9/11 Commission are depressingly hilarious. While you could at least make a bad case that the US government benefited from a coverup in those instances, it's laughable that the Thatcher administration was somehow whitewashing the facts to protect Liverpool fans, of all people, at the expense of the police and the Murdoch press, of all people. It would literally be like saying the 9/11 Commission was trying to cover for Al Qaeda.
Yes, there are people who blame George Bush and Dick Cheney for 9/11 - as in, masterminding the whole operation. How does rational society treat those people, again? That's how Taylor Report conspiracists are treated in the UK. When we give them the time of day here, we only make ourselves look ignorant.
In any case, a quick review of the final report, and a quick glance at the differences in English football from that day to this, should be more than enough to prove that the issues of Hillsborough ran much, much deeper than drunk Liverpool fans showing up late.
As far as it being a long time ago - I think part of that comes from an assumption that the victim's families were compensated anywhere remotely what we in the United States would consider normal. That's far from the case.
Well, except for one of the policemen.
I don't think it's generally understood that this is the reason the HJC keeps harping on about Hillsborough. They're not doing it because they're attention whores. We're not talking about Cindy Sheehan or Nancy Grace here. They have by any reasonable light a legitimate reason to keep their cause going. They are fighting against official police conduct and coverup, which means this is way beyond a Liverpool FC fan spat and into the area of UK civil rights and liberties. Seen in this light, condeming Liverpool fans for memorializing the tragedy is more than a little misguided. (Thank you, Conor, for giving me the BBC link.)
(Yeah, I asked Conor from LFCNY for factual information about the Hillsborough aftermath. I sure as hell wasn't going to ask Cohen, was I?)
Hillsborough was the dark side of the game that forced change, the opposite side of the coin from the 1990 World Cup and England's inspiring performance. Either one or the other would have had significant consequences for the sport - together, it was a case of the sport re-discovering the massive support it had, the potential it had in the modern game, and the consequences of continuing to take that support for granted. It's a completely different situation now in England - probably the only nation that has seen such change in the game from 1989 to 2009 is, well, the United States.
Now, of course, you and I as soccer fans are on the right side of the class divide. Not because we've gone up in the world or because our intrinsic worth has been recognized, but because the good god Sponsorship is beaming his countenance upon the sport, and for the moment having its customers beaten and/or killed is bad for business. It's improbable that things will deteroriate to the point where we're in danger of another stadium crush disaster...mainly because people had to die to make sure we'd be in less danger...but yes, it's not something that we need to get up in the morning and go to bed at night worrying about. That's no excuse to forget what came before, and that's certainly no excuse to forget where we really stand in the grand scheme of things.
"Oh, it's the World Cup, they'll make sure nothing goes wrong." Yeah. You're probably right.
Okay, read this. It's got nothing to do with Liverpool or Hillsborough or anything, but as far as blaming victims, it's useful. Here's the conclusion, if for some reason you won't even click on a damned link when you're asked to:
So this is why it still matters, this is why it's still being talked about, and this is why it's important to get it right.
Okay, what else is there to cover - on a macro basis. I'm saving up a post about Cohen and the actual boycott.
"Yeah, okay, what about Munich chants?"
Yeah, those were pretty bad. That's another case where It Could Have Been Anyone. But bad weather is impersonal. I can feel the frowns from Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, Payne Stewart and Paul Wellstone, but small aircraft crash fall under the heading of bad luck, not criminal negligence. The Busby Babes were not sacrificed on the altar of convenience. They too happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, but there was no one to blame...let alone authorities lying about it after the fact trying to blame the victims.
Probably because of 1958 - and this is just my distant opinion - Manchester United fans by and large haven't responded in kind regarding 1989 with the equivalent volume, especially considering the thirty-year head start Liverpool had. Perhaps also because (a) Liverpool fans weren't exactly the only people in the country making Munich chants - Leeds fans made Liverpool fans look like angels in comparison - but also because (b) Manchester United fans know perfectly well it could have been them. United had gone twenty years without winning anything at the time - had they made an FA Cup semifinal, the crush would have been at least as tragic. The same was true of any club of any size in England. There but for the grace of God, and the sloth of the FA.
I mean - yeah, great, Liverpool sucks, ******** Liverpool, and so forth. No one's saying you have to cheer for them. But just because Liverpool fans cross a big, bright, obvious line doesn't mean it's cool to cross an even more obvious line.
"The Ivory Coast disaster was caused by fan stampedes, so isn't it reasonable to assume that Hillsborough was a similar situation?"
You mean, apart from the Taylor Report saying it wasn't?
Let's look at a few famous examples from music history. Ticketless fans weren't even suggested as an issue for the Who tragedy in Cincinnati in 1979. Ticketless fans showed up in droves for Woodstock...and that ended up fine. Altamont ended up in tragedy, but security was run by the Hells Angels, which was...
Say, you think maybe the common thread here is misconduct or negligence by authority? Let's look at the Ivory Coast tragedy.
Oh, well, I stand corrected, seems pretty open-and-shut to
Hm...the alleged definitive example of fan misconduct turns out to be the definitive example of official misconduct. The only issue is why this would surprise anyone - the same thing happened in Ghana in 2001.
"But what about Heysel? Was it a coincidence that Liverpool scum were at both places?"
Well, yeah. According to Hornby, anyway, and again, it seems to ring true to my ears.
It was Liverpool both times, because Liverpool was the best team in England at the time, so they were the team in a position to be at ground zero both times. Could have been Spurs, could have been United, could have been Arsenal, could have been Chelsea. Liverpool was dumb enough to be good in the 1980's. That's literally all there is to it.
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why can't people just drop this and grow up
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Some people cannot accept the reality that a bunch of Liverpool fans, some portion of them drunk, crushed other Liverpool fans.
But Hillsborough wasn't about Liverpool. It was about soccer fans.
Hell, it wasn't really about soccer. It was about what happens when owners and promoters look down on their audiences. Just like, to pick one example, what happened to Who fans in 1979. By the 1980's, football fans in England were seen as the dregs of society.
You look at the Premier League today, and it's unthinkable that games used to be played in substandard facilities to audiences considered a couple of steps below pond scum. But this isn't a coincidence. The reaction to the Taylor Report in the 1990's wasn't about hooliganism or Liverpool. It was about stadiums. Remember, in 1989, Hillsborough was still one of the best facilities in England. That's why it was picked for an FA Cup semifinal in the first place. The fact that such a decrepit stadium was deemed suitable for such a match shows how moribund and slothful the game had become.
Nowadays, of course, the English game is rich and happy, and a powerful favorite to host a World Cup. If you look at 1989 through a 2009 prism, of course Hillsborough doesn't make sense. But between 1966 and 1989, there were greater profits to be made through inertia than through improvements. The longer things went unchanged, the greater the risk. A disaster was inevitable, it was just a matter of who and where.
For the technical aspects of what went wrong, you can read "Hillsborough for Dummies."
Which is why blaming Liverpool fans is doubly asinine.
Technically, this is Arguing From Authority, but Nick Hornby at least was in England at the time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by My copy of "Fever Pitch," page 218
It could have happened anywhere. It could have happened at Highbury - on the concrete steps leading out of the North Bank down to the street, maybe (and it doesn't require a very elaborate fantasy to imagine that_; or it could have happened at Loftus Road, where thousands of fans can only gain access to the away end through a coffee bar. And there would have been an enquiry, and newspaper reports, and blame attached to the police, or stewards, or drunken fans, or somebody. But that wouldn't have been right, not when the whole thing was based on such a ludicrous premise.
The premise was this: that football stadia built in most cases around a hundred years ago (Norwich City's ground, fifty-eight years old, is the youngest in the First Division) could accommodate between fifteen and sixty-three thousand people without those people coming to any harm. ...By the time football became a forum for gang warfare, and containment rather than safety became a priority (those perimeter fences again), a major tragedy became an inevitability.
...
There was so much that could and should have been done, and nothing ever was, and everyone trundled along for year after year, for a hundred years, until Hillsborough. Hillsborough was the fourth post-war British football disaster, the third in which large numbers of people were crushed to death following some kind of failure in crowd control; it was the first which was attributed to something more than bad luck. So you can blame the police for opening the wrong gate at the wrong time if you life, but in my opinion to do so would be to miss the point.
The premise was this: that football stadia built in most cases around a hundred years ago (Norwich City's ground, fifty-eight years old, is the youngest in the First Division) could accommodate between fifteen and sixty-three thousand people without those people coming to any harm. ...By the time football became a forum for gang warfare, and containment rather than safety became a priority (those perimeter fences again), a major tragedy became an inevitability.
...
There was so much that could and should have been done, and nothing ever was, and everyone trundled along for year after year, for a hundred years, until Hillsborough. Hillsborough was the fourth post-war British football disaster, the third in which large numbers of people were crushed to death following some kind of failure in crowd control; it was the first which was attributed to something more than bad luck. So you can blame the police for opening the wrong gate at the wrong time if you life, but in my opinion to do so would be to miss the point.
Quote:
Originally Posted by "Fever Pitch," p. 224
The Economist on the inevitability of the disaster: "Hillsborough was not just a calamitous accident. It was a brutal demonstration of systematic failure." On the state of the grounds: "Britain's football grounds now resemble maximum-security prisons, but only the feebleness of the regulations has allowed the clubs to go on pretending that crowd safety is compatible with prison architecture." On the football authorities: "For complacency and incompetence, there's nothing like a cartel; and of Britain's surviving cartels, the Football League is one of the smuggest and slackest."
Again, that reads like an archaeology textbook now, because the Football League has been elbowed aside in favor of the Premier League. Do you think all those changes would have come about if the only problem that caused Hillsborough were Liverpool drunks? This is history now, but not ancient history. There's no excuse for not knowing this stuff.
Which brings us to the Taylor Report. Speaking for myself, I've had a neckful of people impeaching the Taylor Report without answering any of the specifics of the report. Comparisons to the Warren Commission or the 9/11 Commission are depressingly hilarious. While you could at least make a bad case that the US government benefited from a coverup in those instances, it's laughable that the Thatcher administration was somehow whitewashing the facts to protect Liverpool fans, of all people, at the expense of the police and the Murdoch press, of all people. It would literally be like saying the 9/11 Commission was trying to cover for Al Qaeda.
Yes, there are people who blame George Bush and Dick Cheney for 9/11 - as in, masterminding the whole operation. How does rational society treat those people, again? That's how Taylor Report conspiracists are treated in the UK. When we give them the time of day here, we only make ourselves look ignorant.
In any case, a quick review of the final report, and a quick glance at the differences in English football from that day to this, should be more than enough to prove that the issues of Hillsborough ran much, much deeper than drunk Liverpool fans showing up late.
As far as it being a long time ago - I think part of that comes from an assumption that the victim's families were compensated anywhere remotely what we in the United States would consider normal. That's far from the case.
Well, except for one of the policemen.
Quote:
Former sergeant Martin Long, who was at Sheffield Wednesday's ground when 96 Liverpool football fans were crushed to death in 1989, is thought to have been awarded £330,000 for post-traumatic stress disorder. In the past few years, another 11 former police officers have received a total of £1.2 million.
By contrast, the families of the Hillsborough victims have been awarded payments of a few thousand pounds each.
Phil Hammond - vice-chairman of the Hillsborough Family Support Group - whose 14-year-old son was killed in the disaster received £3,500. He condemned the Long payment as "disgusting."
By contrast, the families of the Hillsborough victims have been awarded payments of a few thousand pounds each.
Phil Hammond - vice-chairman of the Hillsborough Family Support Group - whose 14-year-old son was killed in the disaster received £3,500. He condemned the Long payment as "disgusting."
(Yeah, I asked Conor from LFCNY for factual information about the Hillsborough aftermath. I sure as hell wasn't going to ask Cohen, was I?)
Hillsborough was the dark side of the game that forced change, the opposite side of the coin from the 1990 World Cup and England's inspiring performance. Either one or the other would have had significant consequences for the sport - together, it was a case of the sport re-discovering the massive support it had, the potential it had in the modern game, and the consequences of continuing to take that support for granted. It's a completely different situation now in England - probably the only nation that has seen such change in the game from 1989 to 2009 is, well, the United States.
Now, of course, you and I as soccer fans are on the right side of the class divide. Not because we've gone up in the world or because our intrinsic worth has been recognized, but because the good god Sponsorship is beaming his countenance upon the sport, and for the moment having its customers beaten and/or killed is bad for business. It's improbable that things will deteroriate to the point where we're in danger of another stadium crush disaster...mainly because people had to die to make sure we'd be in less danger...but yes, it's not something that we need to get up in the morning and go to bed at night worrying about. That's no excuse to forget what came before, and that's certainly no excuse to forget where we really stand in the grand scheme of things.
"Oh, it's the World Cup, they'll make sure nothing goes wrong." Yeah. You're probably right.
Okay, read this. It's got nothing to do with Liverpool or Hillsborough or anything, but as far as blaming victims, it's useful. Here's the conclusion, if for some reason you won't even click on a damned link when you're asked to:
Quote:
We need it to be that simple, that understandable and that fair. Job should not have sinned the way he surely must have sinned. She shouldn't have been out alone, dressed like that, at that time of night. He shouldn't have gotten on the wrong side of the tribal warlord who conned the Americans into detaining him. He shouldn't have reached for his wallet. She shouldn't have fought City Hall. He should have exercised more. She should have eaten healthier. He shouldn't have been so naive. She should have realized that guy was no good. He shouldn't have demanded his rights in such a loud voice. ...
Every inexplicable injustice can thus be traced back to some act on the part of the victim. And thus a world filled with and characterized by inexplicable injustices can be explained and made to seem wholly just. And we can tell ourselves we're safe.
Perfectly safe. As long as we don't think about it too much. And only until the same sort of thing happens to us, at which point our friends will come, like Job's friends, and insist that we must have done something to cause this to happen.
Oldest story in the book.
Every inexplicable injustice can thus be traced back to some act on the part of the victim. And thus a world filled with and characterized by inexplicable injustices can be explained and made to seem wholly just. And we can tell ourselves we're safe.
Perfectly safe. As long as we don't think about it too much. And only until the same sort of thing happens to us, at which point our friends will come, like Job's friends, and insist that we must have done something to cause this to happen.
Oldest story in the book.
Okay, what else is there to cover - on a macro basis. I'm saving up a post about Cohen and the actual boycott.
"Yeah, okay, what about Munich chants?"
Yeah, those were pretty bad. That's another case where It Could Have Been Anyone. But bad weather is impersonal. I can feel the frowns from Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, Payne Stewart and Paul Wellstone, but small aircraft crash fall under the heading of bad luck, not criminal negligence. The Busby Babes were not sacrificed on the altar of convenience. They too happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, but there was no one to blame...let alone authorities lying about it after the fact trying to blame the victims.
Probably because of 1958 - and this is just my distant opinion - Manchester United fans by and large haven't responded in kind regarding 1989 with the equivalent volume, especially considering the thirty-year head start Liverpool had. Perhaps also because (a) Liverpool fans weren't exactly the only people in the country making Munich chants - Leeds fans made Liverpool fans look like angels in comparison - but also because (b) Manchester United fans know perfectly well it could have been them. United had gone twenty years without winning anything at the time - had they made an FA Cup semifinal, the crush would have been at least as tragic. The same was true of any club of any size in England. There but for the grace of God, and the sloth of the FA.
I mean - yeah, great, Liverpool sucks, ******** Liverpool, and so forth. No one's saying you have to cheer for them. But just because Liverpool fans cross a big, bright, obvious line doesn't mean it's cool to cross an even more obvious line.
"The Ivory Coast disaster was caused by fan stampedes, so isn't it reasonable to assume that Hillsborough was a similar situation?"
You mean, apart from the Taylor Report saying it wasn't?
Let's look at a few famous examples from music history. Ticketless fans weren't even suggested as an issue for the Who tragedy in Cincinnati in 1979. Ticketless fans showed up in droves for Woodstock...and that ended up fine. Altamont ended up in tragedy, but security was run by the Hells Angels, which was...
Say, you think maybe the common thread here is misconduct or negligence by authority? Let's look at the Ivory Coast tragedy.
Quote:
Ticketless football fans were behind Sunday's stampede that left 19 people dead in Ivory Coast, officials say.
The government is to hold an emergency meeting over the tragedy which left 132 people injured at the Houphouet-Boigny stadium in the biggest city, Abidjan.
The government is to hold an emergency meeting over the tragedy which left 132 people injured at the Houphouet-Boigny stadium in the biggest city, Abidjan.
Quote:
However, some supporters have said security forces sparked the stampede when they fired tear gas at crowds.
"But what about Heysel? Was it a coincidence that Liverpool scum were at both places?"
Well, yeah. According to Hornby, anyway, and again, it seems to ring true to my ears.
Quote:
Originally Posted by "Fever Pitch" again, pages 156-7
In a sense, their crime was simply being English: it was just that the practices of their culture, taken out of its context and transferred to somewhere that simply didn't understand them, killed people. "Murderers! Murderers!" the Arsenal fans chanted at the Liverpool fans the December after Heysel, but I suspect that if exactly the same circumstances were to be recreated with any group of Engligh fans - and these circumstances would include a hopelessly inadequate police force..., a ludicrously decrepit stadium, a vicious set of opposing fans, and pitifully poor planning on the part of the relevant football authorities - then the same thing would surely happen.
...
In short, Heysel was an organic part of a culture that many of us, myself included, had contributed towards. You couldn't look at those Liverpool fans and ask yourself, as you had been able to do with the Millwall fans at Luton, or the Chelsea fans in their League Cup match, "who are those people?"; you already knew.
...
In short, Heysel was an organic part of a culture that many of us, myself included, had contributed towards. You couldn't look at those Liverpool fans and ask yourself, as you had been able to do with the Millwall fans at Luton, or the Chelsea fans in their League Cup match, "who are those people?"; you already knew.
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Well done Dan. Well done.
I'm glad you explained to posters, who are quick to defend Cohen, why HJC keeps harping about Hillsborough and why it still matters. I only hope that fijiunitied has the good fortune to run into one of thosethat are obviously only in it for the money.Quote:Originally Posted by fijiunitiedFat Irish PricksPosted 31 Jul 2009 at 10:15 PM by Pablo Chicago 
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Dan, great article. Thanks for the (re)education.
I agree that Hillsboro still matters, I agree that officials in charge of the sport were responsible due to their negligence, I agree w/Hornby that you could have slid any English team you wanted into that game and seen the same tragedy.
Liverpool fans, however, have been hit & miss, and I don't see how to get around their actions, even in the last 5 years. In 2005 in Istanbul, 69k seat stadium, no real problems. In 2007- in a stadium roughly the same size- a large disaster happened that saw fans with legit tickets locked out, innocent people teargassed and the generally stupid kind of mini riot that ends with English politicians blaming the stadium for being too small and 'not a football ground', eventhough English teams were in Moscow & Rome in subsequent years in stadiums of similar contrstruction (not football-only) and similar if not smaller size, without similar problems (better plans and smarter police surely a large part of it, no doubt).
Again, Athens police acted poorly in 2007, but other English clubs in identical situations avoided identical incidents. I have no stake in or beef w/Liverpool, and I don't listen to or get involved with Stephen Cohen on this or any other topic, but I don't also believe that everytime it happens it is 100% coincidence.
It seems that because of incidents like Heysel & Hillsboro that L'pool fans should be more careful than the average Joe to avoid a repeat, not less. It would be a touching tribute to the lives lost for their fans to take it as a badge of honor that nothing like that would ever happen again on their watch (which I'm guessing many do), instead of showing up without a ticket and trying to shove in (which sadly some still did as recently as 2007).Posted 31 Jul 2009 at 11:27 PM by jamison 
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Good stuff, but the Busby Babes' accident was not without blame. That team was under the gun by the FA to get back to England for a weekend match. Many were under the impression that the FA might have made the team forfeit any matches it missed if it was fooling around in Europe. Certainly Matt Busby had that in the back of his mind when he requested the plane take off for the third time that evening in 1958.Posted 31 Jul 2009 at 11:28 PM by clevelandstoker
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Great stuffPosted 31 Jul 2009 at 11:39 PM by garnet&blackattack
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Fantastic reading. I thought I knew all about Hillsborough, but I learned quite a few things tonight.Posted 31 Jul 2009 at 11:39 PM by Sachsen
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Wonderful article, Dan. As a Wednesday fan who has spent countless hours at Hillsborough, both before and after the tragedy, and who watched the whole desperate affair on TV that day, and then witnessed the emergency services bringing crush victims into the very ward where my grandfather would die less than a month later, this whole event was a very significant one in my life.
Cohen's utterly stupefying disregard for seriousness of the event, the actual FACTS of the event, and for the families of the Liverpool supporters who died, beggars belief.
Hillsborough is important because that one event - as horrific as it was - almost single-handedly changed the perception and mentality of English soccer fans, and of the people who run soccer in England. From the changes to stadiums, safety, marshalling, police protection, and the actual mindset of the fans themselves, who seemed to almost universally renounce hooliganism in Hillsborough's aftermath.
And, of course, it could have happened anywhere. If not Hillsborough it could easily have been the Villa Park disaster, or the Goodison disaster. Hillsborough wasn't the best, but was nowhere near the worst stadium in England at the time. It really was a timebomb waiting to explode.
The only thing which saddens me is that, with my team's fall from the upper echelons of English football, the word Hillsborough's makes people think of those awful images, and not the football team which tens of thousands still love.Posted 01 Aug 2009 at 12:14 AM by SheffWedFan
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This is one of the best things ever posted on these boards.
I am saying this as a Leeds fan...
Justice for the 96.Posted 01 Aug 2009 at 12:35 AM by wolfp10
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sorry. i was quite shit faced when i typed that.Quote:Originally Posted by Pablo Chicago
Quote:
Originally Posted by fijiunitied
Fat Irish Pricks
that are obviously only in it for the money.Posted 01 Aug 2009 at 12:48 AM by FijiUnited
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Here's to reason.Posted 01 Aug 2009 at 01:00 AM by Crimen y Castigo
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jamison,
You cite the problems in Athens with ticketless Liverpool fans and then go on say there have been no other problems in other stadiums with other fans. This is ridiculously incorrect.
Aren't you forgetting the crowd crushes with Man Utd fans in France or the battles between the police and Man Utd fans in the Olympic Stadium in Rome a couple of seasons ago for example???
You make it sound like Liverpool have been the only fans involved in crowd incidents abroad recently.
I won't even go into the trouble that fans of other teams (both English and non English) have been involved in these last 5 years. There have been plenty in the UEFA Cup as well as the Champions League. Thankfully, none of these incidents (including Athens) were really major or severe.Posted 01 Aug 2009 at 02:12 AM by Mangani
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