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6M

P6

Football’s Blackest Day?

By

Chris Rowland

Introduction

On May 1985 in the northern outskirts of Brussels, 39 football supporters died and hundreds more were treated in hospital when a wall collapsed after fighting involving supporters of Juventus and their opponents that night, Liverpool.

 

It was supposed to have been European club football’s most prestigious event, the European Cup Final, a heavyweight championship decider between 2 of Europe’s blue-chip clubs, and a showpiece occasion to restore football’s, and particularly English football’s, tarnished hooligan-battered image.

 

Instead it just changed football forever. It dominated the headlines for weeks, and changed thinking at the highest level about how the game of football should be organised and presented, and even helped bring down a Government.  Like the assassinations of President Kennedy and John Lennon, the attack on the Twin Towers and the Hillsborough disaster that was to blight the same English football club four years later, it became one of those beacon moments when everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing.

 

This is my personal account of what it was like to be there before, during and after that fateful occasion in the Heysel Stadium, as part of a group of 8 Liverpool supporters who spent that day in Brussels and most of that week in Belgium, who travelled in high excitement and returned to international contempt and condemnation.

 

Part 9 Sample

I’ve no idea what the Heysel Stadium is like now; it’s not called the Heysel Stadium anymore. But on May 29^th 1985, the day it made history, it was a rickety, ramshackle, run-down football and athletics stadium on the north-western edge of the Brussels conurbation. Immediately behind it stands one of Brussels’ most distinctive landmarks, the Atomium. Built for the Brussels World Fair in 1958, it’s a huge metallic reconstruction of the atom, rising hundreds of feet into the sky and instantly recognisable to anyone who has driven around the Brussels peripheral motorway ring. For me it’s a perpetual reminder of the monstrous night of May 25^th 1985. I still cannot see the one without reliving the other. Yet on that perfect late spring evening the Atomium rose majestically into the vivid blue sky, its metal glinting and gleaming in the sun’s glare. In the foreground, the flags of the Heysel Stadium fluttered proudly in proclamation of the stadium’s finest ever moment, its first ever hosting of a major European final – and its last. No scene could have hinted less at the sordid show it held in store.

 

The Heysel is approached by a series of pathways winding through lawns and gardens adjoining the main road.  As expected, the entire area was a ring of steel barricades and temporary fencing, each break manned by police with dogs. Here supporters would be checked for alcohol, weapons and valid tickets before being allowed within 300 yards of the stadium. Beyond, much nearer the ground, a second inner ring would pick off any who had somehow evaded the first search. All customary procedure for football fans.

 

With about half an hour to kick-off, we drank up and left, leaving many still inside the bar. The first security check confirmed the flimsiness that we had encountered throughout thus far; the most cursory and superficial body search revealed a disinterest which could almost have been insulting to fans from the country that consistently tops the hooligan export league. We did not know yet, but these same security checks at the other end of the ground were right now failing to detect a replica handgun, later to be brandished at the height of the carnage by an Italian supporter before a worldwide TV audience of millions.

 

No other security check followed this one. Suddenly we were on our final approach, with no further obstacles.  Away to our right, we could see part of the crowd in one of the terraces, a vast curving sweep of red and white bathed in sunlight. We followed the signs for Blocks X and Y, past the main stand and up a gentle slope. Then we heard a muffled thud, not sharp enough for firecrackers, not metallic enough for clanging gates, but thought nothing of it . Suddenly, ahead of us, a group of supporters were clambering over the wall at the edge of Block Z, shouting and gesticulating. We assumed it was scousers trying to bunk in without tickets and being turned back. More and more appeared, swarming over the wall and charging down the bank towards us. As they drew nearer, still running towards us, it became clear they were not Liverpool supporters trying to get in but Juventus supporters getting out, and heading straight for us. When faced with a number of rival supporters charging at him, the average English football fan’s experience tells him they are not coming for his autograph. Phil’s eyes narrowed: “Bloody hell, these are coming for us here – quick, get a brick, defend ourselves!” The first group arrived, but just ran straight past us, wild-eyed, before barging into some Liverpool fans behind us. One Italian, wearing a silk scarf like a headband, bandanna-style, launched into a bizarre kung-fu routine with circling hands and clucking noises, before sprinting off with the others. More and more came.

 

 “Weird Eye-tie twats, what’s got into them?”

 

We could only put this behaviour down to Latin eccentricity, some pre-match ritual we were entirely unfamiliar with. Or maybe they’d been the ones trying to get in without tickets?

 

We left and continued towards our entrance, completely unaware of the significance of what we had just seen and heard. Our first sight of the crumbly stone walls and old-fashioned turnstiles conjured an image of rosettes and rattles, Kenneth Wolstenholme commentary and the old ‘Match of the Day’ theme tune. It was tragi-comic to behold. The stadium was like a faded actress auditioning for the part of sex kitten. Outside her shabby exterior, an anarchic unsupervised queue swayed and swirled without pattern as it shoved and pushed and sweated towards the wholly inadequate number of turnstiles. All around fans were using forgeries, passing through unchallenged or offering cash to the turnstile operators and being allowed in – a sure indicator of problems in store.  The sacred match tickets seemed to have been relegated to an optional extra. In another major departure from convention, there were no police or stewards just beyond the turnstiles checking and controlling the access points, nor outside to control the surging swaying mass. As the pressure at the front built and built, the screams could be heard for those behind to stop pushing. A chilling foretaste of what was to come four years later at Hillsborough.

 

Having battled to gain entry into the stadium, further reasons for the turnstile chaos became apparent. Immediately beyond the turnstile, a water pipe had fractured, turning the area into a sea of red mud, in which floated endless crushed paper cups and empty can, discarded wrappers from chocolate bars, bags of crisps and other unidentifiable debris. A red cap lay forlornly semi-submerged. The mud-lake was too wide to jump across, so wading was the only alternative. The result; red-spattered jeans and squelchy shoes and socks. It also meant a build-up of bodies just beyond the turnstile, restricting the smooth flow of supporters into the ground from outside, and at the point where the crowd pressure was greatest.

 

Once over the water-jump, the next obstacle was a choking swirling cloud of red dust as the decrepit building’s foundations were scuffed into life by the stampede of thousands of pairs of feet. Ahead of us, partly no doubt as a result of the cavalier approach to ticket control and ground admission, the terracing was a solid, impenetrable Red Sea with no parting – and there were still thousands outside waiting to get in, most presumably possessing a genuine match ticket and thus expecting there to be a space for them. But they, like us, would have to lever their way through, prising bodies apart and wedging their own into the tiny gap created, which would snap shut instantly behind them as they pushed forwards another few inches in the sweltering body heat. We saw that on many of the crush barriers, the concrete had crumbled away to reveal the exposed metal reinforcing strips inside, rusted and twisted.

 

The sense of disappointment at the standard of venue was palpable; this did not feel like European football’s grandest occasion. You want to be impressed, awestruck, by the theatrical sense of occasion a stadium can generate; I thought back to the grandeur and pageant of the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, the inspiring first impressions and the explosion of sound and vision created by Liverpool’s 30,000+-strong army of fans. In stark contrast, the inglorious Heysel felt second-rate, squalid, shorn of style, class and majesty, and with organisation to match. 

 

We finally found a position where we could see what should have been the green of the pitch. Instead, the entire near right-hand quarter of the vivid green playing surface had been engulfed by a human spillage of epic scale - a tangled mass of fans, police, stewards, officials, press photographers and paramedics.

 

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