They’ll never walk alone …
When you start supporting a football club, you don’t support it because of the trophies, or a player, or history, you support it because you found yourself somewhere there; found a place where you belong.
Dennis Bergkamp
The creation of a European ‘Super’ league is much in the news right now. However, this week’s Reflection is that it’s thirty-two years ago last week that ninety-six people lost their lives at a football match. I watched that tragedy unfold on the TV. My plan was to listen to the game, a Cup semi-final, on the radio. However, the radio commentators quickly moved from talking of football to reporting on a tragedy. I switched on the TV and sat both dumb, and horror, struck as the awful scene played out before me.
Four years earlier, I’d watched a similar scene when fifty-six people lost their lives at a football match. I was on a family holiday at the time. I bought some beer in the daytime to have a pint or two while watching a European Final in the evening. The beer remained untouched.
A fortnight before that, a fire in a football ground also took the lives of fifty-six people. I happened to be at another football match when that tragedy unfolded. Those days before mobiles and instant news meant I arrived home knowing nothing of events. I turned on the TV news to find that cameras had captured the full horror. A small glimmer of fire in the main stand became a roaring blaze in only a few minutes. The cause was as simple as a discarded cigarette. Training in firefighting now uses the TV recording of that disaster to demonstrate how quickly a fire can spread and how deadly its effect.
This piece isn’t about the why’s and wherefores. Who’s responsible. Who’s to blame. This is to remember, not just the Hillsborough 96. But also, the Heysel 56. The Bradford 56. And all who’ve gone to watch a football game from which they did not return.
Some twelve years before the Hillsborough tragedy, I, too, had been inside that very ground to watch a Cup semi-final. That one was between NUFC and Burnley. The ageing venue was of large capacity. But as with so many of its like at the time, it was ill-suited to effective crowd distribution. The crush of spectators at important games was the norm. It “added to the atmosphere”. None imagined that disaster might result.
I saw my first live professional football game in 1966. I’ve attended many hundreds since. I’ve seen games in lots of dilapidated stadiums. Stood in wooden stands that were well past their best in health and safety. In those days of unrestricted smoking, smokers commonly discarded lit cigarettes. Dropping them, intent on underfoot extinguish.
I know the crushing effect of a great crowd. Packed shoulder to shoulder and chest to back with fellow supporters. My own movement dictated by those around me. A surge easily carrying me down four or five steps of terracing.
These days of all-seated stadium mean much-reduced numbers. And of course, they are non-smoking. These days, when I sit comfortably in my ‘Platinum Club’ seat, my half-time drink ordered, my thoughts at times drift back to how it once was. And to those who lost their lives by simply going to a football match.
A friend once asked what was at the heart of my enjoyment of (one might say devotion to) football, especially my support of NUFC. It’s been decades since they won anything of note and to watch them now means I have a round trip of some five hundred miles.
In truth, I find it difficult to find my own words in answer to that question. I tend to fall back on this from one of my footballing heroes, Bobby Robson.
“What is a club in any case? Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it. It’s not the television contracts, get-out clauses, marketing departments or executive boxes. It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city. It’s a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father’s hand, gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him and, without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love”.
Over fifty years ago, a small boy did indeed hold his father’s hand as together they climbed up the steps into a stadium to watch an evening game. The boy enraptured by the assault on his senses. The ocean of green turf. The blinding incandescence of the floodlights. The intermingling aroma of tobacco smoke and cut grass. The gladiatorial emergence of the players. The throaty roar of thousands in encouragement and admonishment. The multitudinous explosive emotion of seeing their team score.
That night a boy fell helplessly in love with a game and a team. I suspect just like those who lost their lives in Sheffield, Brussels, and Bradford.
This week’s music? It just must be this.
