Premier League Nonsense

For football fans of my age group, we don’t need official acknowledgement of what happened that tragic afternoon at Hillsborough when 96 people never returned from a football match.

We know what happened. We saw it ourselves, week in, week out.

One game sticks in my mind. It was Luton Town away in the FA Cup in 1986. Luton is not that far from London, a short drive or railway ride, and it was expected plenty of Arsenal would make the short journey.

Their Kenilworth Road stadium was small even then. The away end was an open terrace with three enclosures; the farm animal terminology is used advisedly. The Arsenal support had the left hand enclosure, the home support had a smattering on the right hand enclosure and the middle pen was empty.

Our enclosure soon filled up with fans paying at the gate and forcing their way through the entrance on to the terrace. Pretty soon the pen was full. Uncomfortably so. Yet fans were still queuing, still trying to get in. Down at the front, where the pressure was heaviest, some young lads tried to tell the police what was happening but they didn’t care. They kept beckoning fans forward.

Soon, people were shouting at the police, telling them something had to be done, the crush was so great. As they climbed the fences that kept us from the pitch and divided our terrace from the middle enclosure the police prodded them with batons and threatened them with arrest if they didn’t climb down.

There was nothing we could do. We were hemmed in. A snack at half time or a visit to the toilet was out of the question. All the while, next to us was a large expanse of empty terrace that the police would not allow to be opened.

For the best part of two hours we were stuck. We craned to see the action on the field and we yelled abuse at the police and their apathy. That no one was hurt or seriously injured that night says much about the nature of the average football supporter in those days despite how the government liked to portray them.

English football in the 1980s wasn’t the big fluffy thing it is today. Football hooliganism may have been on the wane, due more to a shift in culture than to any government policies or policing strategies and you would never have seen the Prime Minister of the time, Margaret Thatcher, hobnobbing with the big names of the game at Number 10 let alone anywhere else.

Football was for pariahs. It was played by pariahs and watched by pariahs.

Violence had marred the game for years. So many years people had forgotten what had triggered hooliganism off in the first place. Football, the police and the government had no idea how to counter it because they had no idea how the young lads involved felt.

The default reaction to the latest riot was ‘birch them’.

1985 in many ways saw a sea change in the way football was viewed by fans. Many had grown up with punk and its do it yourself mindset that said anyone could form a band and anyone could write about music.

The last day of the season saw serious disturbances all across the country. A young fan died in Birmingham as Leeds United fans went on the rampage. Brighton and Hove Albion fans duked it out with visiting Sheffield United fans on the south coast.

But all that was pushed off the back pages by the horrific fire at Valley Parade, Bradford that claimed 56 lives. That brought into focus the dilapidated state of most stadiums in the country.

Then, just weeks later that tragedy was overtaken by Heysel Stadium when 39 fans, English and Italian, died at the European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus. Prime Minister Thatcher was livid at being so humiliated on prime time TV by the sight of Liverpool fans rampaging across the terraces in Brussels and demanded action.

Many football fans had grown up with punk and its do it yourself mindset that said anyone could form a band and anyone could write about music. A thousand photo copied fanzines gave information kids wanted to read about that the mainstream journalists weren’t up to date with. They would write about what the kids wanted to write about and they found a ready audience among the punks, skins and mods of the time who were largely ignored by a media that has been trained to jump on bandwagons and destroy them.

So it was with football. Fanzines started appearing on street corners round the country on match day put together by supporters fed up with the dull as dishwater coverage football received on TV, much less than today but just as bland, and in newspapers.

Fingerpost, Terrace Talk and When Saturday Comes were among the trailblazers and soon a bookshop on the Charing Cross Road became a must stop destination for fans looking for their latest fill of fan fuelled banter.

Fanzines tapped into a psyche. Fans were fed up being tarred with the same brush as hooligans. The logic, in those days, is one many in Indonesia will identify with today. If you go to football, the reasoning went, you are a hooligan. If you are not a hooligan then you are, in some way, still responsible for what happens.

Fine, upstanding folk would elbow each other and exchange knowing looks. ‘He goes to football,’ they would say, ‘he is, you know, one of them. A hooligan.’

That was the initial reaction to the tragedy on the Leppings Lane in April, 1985. And that was how the police and football conspired to have it portrayed. They blamed the Liverpool fans. It suited Thatcher and her merry men to continue the charade even if they were not actually involved in any cover up.

Even though we weren’t there, we knew it was lies. Because we had been there. We had been in similar situations on other terraces around the country and we knew, better than any suit in parliament or in the media how the police treated fans.

 First printed in Jakarta Globe