it was also reported that
“… while it is true that the stadium was in abject condition, that juventus’ supporters found their way into a supposedly neutral section at the liverpool end, and that local police inflamed the situation, the fact is that without these antagonistic charges, nobody would have died.”
well, you could just as easily turn that around. Had the stadium not been in abject condition, had juventus’ supporters not found their way into a supposedly neutral section at the liverpool end, had local police not inflamed the situation, nobody would have died either. It took all those factors to be present for the tragedy to occur, you can’t just highlight one over another because it suits your purposes.
Yet despite all the concerns about the heysel stadium’s unsuitability as a venue for a match of such magnitude, and the ticking time bomb of ticket distribution in section z, uefa still refused to amend their decision that this outdated and universally condemned stage was suitable and safe for europe’s showpiece football match between two of europe’s most passionately-followed teams. In doing so they were taking a dangerous and highly irresponsible risk. They gambled and lost, and blamed somebody else.
Poor crowd control and segregation and a stadium in appalling condition is a potentially lethal combination. As a result of the ticket selling arrangements and the decision to overlook the ground’s poor condition, 50,000 people were in danger without realising it, before they even left home. These elements were already swirling in the ether long before the day of the game itself; all it would take for the final link in the chain to be joined was a couple of other factors, notably the failure to enforce an alcohol ban and the presence of forged tickets in circulation. It just left the hooligans to deliver the coup de grâce.
Nobody from uefa, european football’s governing body, has ever been truly called to account for the tragic events in brussels, and for their disastrous decision to stage the game at this shambles of a stadium. Uefa has never had the decency to admit to its culpability, to its significant part in what happened. Liverpool’s hooligan fringe kept the authorities out of the spotlight where they really belonged, right alongside them.
Over the years, much of the worst of football violence has occurred outside the stadia, in surrounding streets and town centres. Where crowd trouble has occurred inside football grounds, two factors have routinely been present; inadequate crowd segregation and alcohol. By may 1985, there was every reason to expect that the football authorities and police everywhere had learnt those lessons. Alcohol had long been banned inside grounds and on organised transport to matches, and fans had long come to accept that bars near to grounds would be closed. Indeed, finding a bar or pub open and trading normally near a ground would almost be an insult to a hooligan, as though he had been deemed not worthy of special measures, not dangerous enough, his presence not acknowledged, thus providing every motivation to prove them wrong. A town shuttered and boarded up whilst its residents cower behind locked doors and hold their breath is enough to make any hooligan burst with macho pride. It is possible, even commonplace, for a city to impose a fairly effective, if not cast-iron, alcohol curfew. Rome had certainly got close to it twelve months before heysel. Of course it is an imposition upon the normal lives of the local population, and of course it isn’t fair. Of course it cannot be justified just because some english can’t control themselves after a few beers. But it can be done.
In brussels, however, it was harder to find a bar that was closed, even in the vicinity of the heysel stadium itself, including one right opposite the main approach to the stadium for liverpool supporters. We witnessed with rising disbelief (and it must be said, delight) how easy it was to buy beer. For the bars of brussels it was business as usual, and they did a lot of business that hot sunny day. The carrot was dangled, and taken voraciously. It meant many liverpool fans arrived in varying stages of intoxication –– that is beyond doubt. But there was another, less obvious effect of the bars remaining open: It sent a signal that today lads, all your usual rigorous match day disciplines and impositions are suspended. This cultural remission made it feel like being on holiday; the end of wartime rationing; a prisoner finding his cell door wide open and nobody about. A tone was set, and an underswell of recklessness, lawlessness and anarchy developed: We don’t have to behave today. Some football supporters don’t need any second invitation, but they got one nonetheless.
If any confirmation was needed that normal rules had been suspended for the day, the casual laissez faire attitude of the police and the flimsy security checks outside and inside the ground provided plenty. In another major departure from convention, few fans were stopped and searched at the turnstiles, or had their tickets checked on the approaches to the stadium. In paris in 1981, fans had been required to show their tickets at several concentric rings of steel before reaching the stadium. Without a valid match ticket, that was as close as you were ever going to get. At heysel, although there was no shortage of police and barking dogs and metal barricades, it appeared as though they were there for a separate event entirely; they didn’t intervene in our lives in any way.
A similar absence of familiar basic procedures prevailed at the decrepit, archaic turnstiles. Had there been stewards or police immediately beyond the turnstiles to deter people from either trying to break in without tickets or from using fakes, it would have paid great dividends. Again, that was the custom at home. Instead, a sea of forgeries swept through unchecked and unnoticed, some fans just offered cash or pushed through, and the word spread rapidly that tickets may not be entirely necessary to get in to this match. Our precious tickets that we had sweated to get hold of were relegated to optional extras. Once again, the message seemed to be “do as you please, we have no control, no idea and quite frankly no interest”. Like children given too much freedom and not enough discipline, that freedom was abused by some.
Once inside the shambolic stadium, the ineffective control over ground admission, the apparent lack of expertise in handling a crowd and the magnitude of the occasion led to the inevitable result: Utter chaos. More supporters were crammed into blocks x and y than there was room for.
By 7pm on match day, all of these factors conspired to leave many thousands of liverpool supporters shoehorned into a shabby, sweltering, over-crowded terrace under a warm sun, with a collective air of indiscipline and the temporary suspension of usual match day patterns. An industrial quantity of alcohol had fired imaginations, deadened inhibitions and further fuelled the brooding undercurrent. And there, just a few feet away in the adjoining section of terrace beyond some flimsy chicken wire, was block z, not empty or neutral but occupied by rival supporters. That football fans will partake liberally if bars are open is one of life’s constants. Their refusal to tolerate rivals in their midst is another. Football supporters are nothing if not territorial, and this was after all our end of the stadium. To some amongst the liverpool supporters –– those who have ingrained within them that dismal primal instinct for violence –– the italian proximity was inflammatory and, as the us military might put it, an intolerable violation of their territorial integrity. And block z, as yet by no means full, also held the blissful prospect of the extra space that our section so clearly lacked. And what was to stop us laying claim to it? –– a handful of ill-trained police and a flimsy stretch of chicken wire.
Could you ever devise a more volatile cocktail at a football match? There was motive, opportunity, and no apparent deterrent –– the conditions were perfect. In the circumstances, the only surprise would have been a trouble-free evening. And given an identical set of circumstances, there can be little doubt that had any other mass-supported major english club reached that final instead of liverpool, their fans would have behaved exactly as liverpool’s did, if not worse. There would still have been confrontation, the ground would still have been a ruin, the wall would still have collapsed, and the same history would have been made.
Proper ticket allocation, good ticket control at the stadium approach and access points, effective crowd segregation inside, adequate policing and security arrangements, appropriate facilities and strictly enforced alcohol bans or restrictions: All these actions would have denied the opportunity for violence. ‘controlling the controllables’, in business jargon. In failing so transparently in every single one of those basic areas, the authorities handed on a plate to the small thug element amongst liverpool’s contingent the sort of opportunity which they had properly been denied at home for years, and which in all honesty they never expected to see again. And when they saw it, a depressing handful tucked in like a beggar at a banquet.
And yet, and yet, even then, even at that late stage, after virtually everything that could have been done wrongly had been, the tragedy could still have been averted. All that was needed was for the police, inadequate in numbers and training though they were, to be quicker to recognise the blindingly obvious warning signs and take decisive action to separate the rival sets of fans and defuse the inflammatory, simmering eyeball-to-eyeball proximity, by forming a human barrier between the rival supporters and creating a buffer zone. It was the custom then, in england and almost everywhere else. They could then have maintained the buffer zone throughout the match, with the aid of reinforcements, or had the option of leading the italian supporters out of block z to the other end of the ground where their own supporters were (and where they would have preferred to be anyway), which would also have allowed the liverpool contingent to overflow into block z to ease the congestion. Instead, they became paralysed by indecision as the situation worsened, and when what a belgian eyewitness in block z later described as “the incomprehensible panic of the italians” took hold, the police merely herded the fleeing italian fans at baton point back towards the trouble they were seeking to escape. The pressure on the flimsy, crumbly perimeter wall grew and grew, and finally, disastrously, proved too much, leaving the police to watch on helplessly as the results of their indecision swelled to monstrous proportions.
