Friday, April 1, 2011
Stand Your Ground
I wasn’t at Hillsbrough on that fateful day in April, 1989. I have though been on overcrowded terraces, corralled by inhumane fences animal rights wouldn’t accept for pigs on their way to slaughter policed by coppers with the sensitivity of a redneck preacher.
No, I wasn’t at Hillsbrough. But I have been at the Manor Ground, Oxford. Kenilworth Road, Luton. The Dell, Southampton. I have seen fans pass out due to the overcrowded yet stay standing. I have seen police threaten to arrest fans who were merely trying to attract the attention of medics to deal with their friend.
Every once in a while the half hearted call for terraces to return to English football returns. Banned n the wake of the Hillsbrough disaster, nearly all clubs in England are now all seater even though many fans still continue to stand because that is what they grew up with and no amount of legislation can erase what’s in your blood.
As fans speak up and say yep, we want the choice. We want to decide whether we sit or stand, we get the victims’ relatives wheeled out and telling us, no, under no circumstances should terraces be allowed to return. They killed people. The victim card is the ace of spades in disputes in the west. No government will ever go against it and a whole pressure group industry has grown up around victims.
We have the 1st anniversary of a disaster, the 2nd, the 3rd and so on and so forth. We get minute’s silences when a player’s budgerigar dies these days or when they lose their lucrative sponsorship with a football boot supplier. The sheer emotion of those regurgitated images from Hillsbrough, the sad faces of victims’ relatives as they relive those fateful moments tug at our heart strings until we’re made to feel complete insensitive bastards unworthy of living.
But if we step back from the emotion, if we just look at the cold hard facts of life on football’s terraces back then we will see that Hillsbrough was a disaster waiting to happen. But not because of terraces. Many fans of my age will recall being in uncomfortable situations on the terraces, unless they supported Halifax Town or teams like that. But the situations were manmade.
The fences and the policing were relatively new to the football scene back in the 70s and 80s. Increased hooliganism at games had seen people powerless as the thugs seemed to have taken over the game. Week in, week out away fans would travel in numbers and try and infiltrate the home end. To ‘take’ the home end, to kick out the home support, that was what it was all about. And for years the football authorities and police didn’t have a clue how to react.
One of the first things they did was to throw increased numbers of police officers at the problem. But the bobby on the spot didn’t really know what they were up against and the hooligans were always a few steps ahead of them in their planning and tactics.
Later came the fences surrounding the pitch. Just think, had Selhurst Park had fences Eric Cantona would never have attacked Matthew Simmons!
The fences were inhumane and uncomfortable and obviously a safety risk. The police and the authorities treated everyone at a football match with suspicion. It was a potent cocktail but at the time nobody could see how potent.
In the mid 1980s Oxford United reached the top flight of English football in what we then called the First Division. Their Manor Ground was tiny and shit. They had only been a professional team for a couple of decades and their infrastructure hadn’t kept up with their rapid rise through the divisions. It was sorely unfit for any kind of support let alone the home fans. Away fans had a terrace of a dozen concrete steps or so and impossibly high mesh fences to keep them as unhappy as possible. You pissed where you stood and you starved if there was a big away support!
A flash media tycoon had taken over the club, pumping in big money and attracting promising young players. Sounds familiar? But he did nothing about the stadium which was stuck in a non league time warp.
One end of season game there with the Arsenal. It was a shit game, we lost as we nearly always did. And it was hot which it nearly always wasn’t. Someone on the away terrace fainted. Moving was impossible, we were all jammed in like a Mumbai commuter train at peak time. Voices yelled out to the police, do something, our friend is in trouble but PC Plod, patrolling up and down in front of the fence, prowling like a caged animal, ignored the cries for water. A couple of lads tried to scale the fence, seeking attention from someone, anyone who might have a streak of humanity about them. Plod reacted, prodding the offenders, telling them to get down or they would be ‘nicked’!
Eventually, but not until a grueling and testing few minutes had passed which had seen most in the enclosure get more and more riled, the medics were able to remove the poor woman. Arsenal fans were pretty well behaved as a group back then. Had it have been Millwall or Leeds things could have gotten nasty.
A couple of years later another incident, one that has always stayed with me. I never liked Luton Town as a club, this made me hate them more.
There was an open terrace at Kenilworth Road then with a couple of steel railings dividing it into three enclosures. Of course at the front of the terrace was another fence to stop players attacking fans ala Cantona. Looking from the terrace Arsenal that night had the left side enclosure. The middle one was empty except for a couple of stewards to throw the ball back while the right hand side had a smattering of old buggers.
It ain’t far from North London to Luton, a short hop n the train or a quick drive up the M1. Arsenal fans soon filled that pen. And then some. There were people in there whose feet never touched the concrete terraces, they were so tightly wedged in. and yet despite the obvious discomfort fans continued to be funneled into that one pen.
Plod was at the front, waving fans forward or to the sides. They didn’t get it. Nobody could bloody move. Tempers got worse. Contrary to common perception, not everyone back in the mid 1980s who attended football matches was a hooligan. There were women and old men on that terrace but the cops didn’t give a shit. To them we were all the same. We all belonged behind bars and if we pissed where we stood, well, that just proved it didn’t it? We were at football, we were scum.
As at Oxford, fans tried to climb the fences to let Plod know what was going on. The police of course loved this. It was football fans being hooligans like they read in their manuals and had been taught at school. They saw fans trying to invade the pitch. The cries for help were ignored, treated as bullshit from the flotsam and jetsam on the terraces from North London.
Fans beseeched the police to open the middle enclosure but they weren’t having it. They weren’t authorized to do that. People could have suffocated but that would have been ok, there was no bastard in blue who was willing to earn the wrath of their supervisor by lightening our load. And we were brought up believing the police’s job was to protect the public.
That Hillsbrough happened didn’t surprise many. The scale of it did. But should we today, over 20 years later, still be held hostage by the tears and images of the Lepping Lane terrace? Should we be denied at least the choice of whether we stand or sit at football? The nanny state, the state that pays the salaries of the apathetic coppers and demanded the fences in the first place, now tells us we have to sit and no, you don’t get a voice on the matter because of the 96.
Life has moved on since 1989 and so has football. Not always in good ways but these are the words of a 40 something and as one gets older one resents change more. In 2011 there is no need for overcrowded terraces. With tickets sold in advance, and clubs getting the cash up front, there is a control mechanism in place that effectively limits the numbers of people that can stand. That never happened in the past when you would rarely hear of fans locked out, clubs, egged on by a nervous police worried about may happen outside the stadium If they weren’t let in (remember, all fans are thugs was the credo at the time) would happily shoehorn the fans in.
You’re still gonna get the insensitivity and inhumanity from people in uniform, be they police or stewards. For them the uniform is their vestment and their regulations carry a messianic quality.
Maybe the police don’t want terracing. Their old thinking won’t go away that quick. Maybe the clubs don’t want terracing. But what about the fans? Isn’t it worth listening to alternate voices rather than the same old stanza being played again and again.
Of course the police would cite security concerns and the clubs would cite increased costs of converting seats into a terrace. And you can be sure the maths would be skewed in such a way that were terracing to be introduced, ticket prices would not be made cheaper.
The Germans can do it though. But then the Germans can do many things we in England can’t. The image of the tiny, hearty band of away fans standing on an uncovered, windswept terrace is fading and for many that is a good thing. Like the abolition of chimney sweeps. But we as individuals are formed by our pasts and our ability to face hardship and tribulation, which is never taught at school, comes from shared experiences in our lives.
The terraces won’t come back because the people who make decisions don’t want them back. For people like me, we’re left with our memories of a fading culture. For the fan of today, seduced by Gazza’s tears and Gary Lineker advertising potato crisps, they must develop their own football culture revolving around comfy chairs, baguettes and 60 quid a ticket. Viewing from a far I can’t help but think something is missing from their experience…
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