Liverpool

[PaulC]

You can't really include Origi in that list because he hasn't even played for Liverpool. The rest i agree with, although Lallana has ability but Rodgers has failed to get the best out of him.

[Folski]

I think he will definitely be chopped in the summer. Anyone think we could see a manager swap between the two Liverpool teams?

[rodders0223]

Moreno and Markovic have been far from impressive, but they are young enough I think to bounce back from poor seasons. Certainly wouldn't right them off totally.

Can looks decent to me.

Lallana can turn it on now and again, that's how he has always been in his career. Will be an asset, a very expensive one.

 

 

Balotelli and Lovren, they will take massive hits on those no doubt.

[PaulC]

I think he will definitely be chopped in the summer. Anyone think we could see a manager swap between the two Liverpool teams?

Didn't Martinez turn Liverpool down before.

[Stevo985]

£12m for Moreno is ludicrous. He is absolute pony.

[dudevillaisnice]

Tony Barrett ‏@TonyBarretTimes

Rodgers on Jon Flanagan: "He's been a huge miss for us. There was a time last season when he was arguably the best full back in the league."

[gharperr]

ill be amazed if klopp goes to pool. why would he go from a team which gets champs league nearly every year and gets past the group stages to a team which is likely isnt going to get champs league for the next few years. Itll be a step down in terms of managment. Plenty of champs league teams will offer him the job and im sure he has enough money to wait for the right club

Edited May 1, 2015 by gharperr

[Folski]

 

I think he will definitely be chopped in the summer. Anyone think we could see a manager swap between the two Liverpool teams?

Didn't Martinez turn Liverpool down before.

 

 

Only if you believe Dave Whelan. Liverpool were adamant he wasn't offered it.

[Folski]

ill be amazed if klopp goes to pool. why would he go from a team which gets champs league nearly every year and gets past the group stages to a team which is likely isnt going to get champs league for the next few years. Itll be a massive step down in terms of managment. Plenty of champs league teams will offer him the job and im sure he has enough money to wait for the right club

 

Klopp's stock has probably taken a bit of a hit this season, his next job is absolutely vital. That being said there is probably 10 clubs in Europe he would go to.

 

Barca, Real, City, Munich, United, Chelsea, Arsenal, PSG, Juventus, Liverpool.

 

With a likely job opening in the summer at City he'd be mad not to take that and have a blank cheque book to work with, I don't think any of the other jobs will be up will they?

[gharperr]

i def think youre over valuing liverpool here because of their past success which was years ago. Just think of the recent managers they have gone for. None of them are the level of Klopp. I think most boards will realise Dortmund has had a freakish season and haven't they had LOADS of injuries? so his stock wouldnt have taken that much of a hit

He doesnt exactly have a blank cheque book with city either...Theyre still limited by FFP and they need a massive overhaul of the squad. Its going to be very tough for the next city manager and their current players just dont suit his style (in my very limited knowledge of klopp).

swear i read somewhere he might take a year out of football anyway. i dont know where i read that though

Edited May 1, 2015 by gharperr

[rodders0223]

Tony Barrett ‏@TonyBarretTimes

Rodgers on Jon Flanagan: "He's been a huge miss for us. There was a time last season when he was arguably the best full back in the league."

 

 

He was very good.

...and this league isn't exactly blessed with great fullbacks at the minute.

[Zatman]

Yeah Flanagan was brilliant last season, he nearly even made the World Cup squad

[Zatman]

 

 

The signings have been an absolute disaster not one real gem out however many they bought.

 

Much as I want to agree, I have to point out that Coutinho has been pretty good for the most part.

 

 

Ah ya but the signings with the Suarez money have been a disaster. I mean Spurs pissed away the Bale money but got something in Eriksen but 

 

Lambert £4m

Lallana £25m

Can £10m

Markovic £20m

Lovren £20m

Origi £10m

Moreno £12m

Balotelli £16m

 

 

but he didnt sign them players exclusively which is a problem at Liverpool

 

though of the list Can is only one that looks good and they play him defence

[kurtsimonw]

Tony Barrett ‏@TonyBarretTimes

Rodgers on Jon Flanagan: "He's been a huge miss for us. There was a time last season when he was arguably the best full back in the league."

I browse RAWK for the hilarity from time to time, they had a World Team of the Year thread and a good 90% of them had Flanagan in the side. It's quite odd how deluded they get. Think most of the XIs had about 7 or 8 Liverpool players in them.

[Zatman]

I remember few seasons back they had a world class player thread and this was in Benitez last season when they were awful and players like Lucas, Kuyt and Johnson was mentioned. One quote was something like Aquilani is as good a passer as Xabi was 

 

classic 

[dont_do_it_doug.]

I have been reading up about Heysel today. I think anyone wanting to lay the blame solely at the feet of Liverpool FC for this need to do their own research before making such a blanket observation. I will never condone the actions of hooligans, but it really isn't as simple as "Liverpool fans are scum".

[dont_do_it_doug.]

Interesting (and incredibly long!) read here - https://thegreatcritique.wordpress.com/2013/12/09/hillsborough-heysel-valley-parade-and-ibrox-why-are-stadium-disasters-always-prone-to-urban-mythology/

 

 

3rd Myth – Heysel. “Scousers were the worst hooligans in the 80’s. At Heysel, they were murderers!”

The Heysel Stadium Disaster happened less than three weeks after the Valley Parade Fire, and it is fair to suggest that, had it not happened, the Fire would be far more vividly remembered today.

The Disaster in Brussels was probably the most notorious episode of hooliganism in the history of European football, chiefly because the chaos was broadcast live on television all around the world – it happened shortly before the 1985 European Champions’ Cup Final was due to kick off.

Now, this is certainly no attempt to exonerate or defend the behaviour of the supporters of either team in Brussels on the night of the Disaster, but it is beyond doubt that the Heysel Disaster is, both in terms of identifying the events on the day and of identifying its causes and origins, a leading candidate for being the single most widely misunderstood and most wildly mythologised football disaster of all.

The mythological version has it that supporters of Liverpool Football Club, with a supposed history of routinely violent behaviour at the time, travelled to Brussels for the European Cup Final against Juventus of Italy in the mood for a fight. When they got into the stadium, so the myth has it, they sought out the nearest enclosure to contain a large presence of Italian supporters, then stampeded into it and started murdering them indiscriminately.

This portrayal of events sounds far too vivid and crude to be true even without analysing the facts first. And sure enough it is too vivid and crude to be true.

What actually happened; –

The real causes of the Heysel Disaster were far, far more complex and varied than a simplistic, stereotyped “Scousers-were-looking-for-trouble” narrative, and the loss of life on the night, while inexcusable, was certainly not murder. And although the immediate responsibility for the Disaster does, in the end, lie with the Liverpool supporters, the blame is far from exclusively theirs. What really happened, and why it happened, is quite a long and complicated story, as shall be outlined below.

It is also utterly untrue to claim that Liverpool fans had a particularly bad reputation or record of misbehaviour at the time. It was not exactly free of blemishes, no – many Liverpool fans had a deserved reputation for kleptomania when on their travels around the continent – but given that the club had played far more European matches than any other British side at the time, the history of Liverpool supporter-conduct abroad was remarkably good. Certainly it was far better proportionally than the usual behaviour of fans of the England national team at the time, or of clubs such as Tottenham Hotspur or Leeds United. (Those who blame Liverpool for the five-year ban imposed on English clubs from taking part in European competition after 1985  are looking for scapegoats for a problem that, in reality, was almost endemic across the country.)

The root causes of the Disaster itself were actually sowed in previous years. In 1982, the European football union, UEFA, was looking for venues to host the European Cup Final over the next few years, and was invited to consider Heysel. The stadium had hosted the Final three times previously, including in 1958, only the third European Cup Final ever played. It had also hosted three Finals of the European Cup-Winners’ Cup, one of the secondary European competitions (now defunct).

What UEFA does not appear to have been made aware of, or perhaps just did not put much thought to, was that the Heysel Stadium was in fact in an advancing state of disrepair. It was already over fifty years old and the very concrete it was constructed from was decaying. Arsenal supporters had attended a Cup-Winners’ Cup Final there in 1980, and they had concluded unanimously and unreservedly that it was ‘a dump’. Indeed, a demolition order had been served on the stadium, which was expected to be carried out in 1986. With this order in place, the authorities in Belgium did not bother to continue with maintenance work on the ground, the attitude being “Why waste money repairing something when we’re going to demolish it soon anyway?”

Whether UEFA ever bothered to carry out a formal inspection of Heysel before making its decision is not completely clear. The rumour, perhaps an apocryphal story, is that a UEFA delegation did attend the ground in the winter of 1982-83, but that it was so cold on the morning of the inspection that they decided to give it a miss, and just approved the stadium. “It’s hosted European Finals before,” seemed to have been the thinking, “it can host one more.” This sounds so casual, especially given the demolition order that was already in place, that the story needs to be treated with caution. But it has to be said, it does seem to have an uncomfortable ring of truth to it, if only because, had an inspection in fact gone ahead, it seems inconceivable that the UEFA delegates would have agreed to let the biggest sporting fixture in all of Europe be played there.

Whatever the reality of that, the reality of the stadium was that it was not in a condition fit for a crowd at a Third Division League match, let alone a European Cup Final. The perimeter walls, made of aged cinder-block, were brittle and worn. The concrete surface of the terraces had long-since broken up into loose blocks resting on top of the foundations. Fences were feeble and rusted. The ground would have been hard-pressed to host a meeting of a local Rotary Club in adequate safety. But it was eventually confirmed to be the venue for the 1985 European Champions’ Cup Final.

In May 1984, Liverpool Football Club reached the Final. It was the club’s fourth appearance in the Final since 1977, and on all three previous appearances, the team had gone on to lift the most prestigious trophy in European sport.

This year, their opponents would be an Italian club, AS Roma, who were a major force in Italian football at the time, but had still never become European Champions. This was surely Roma’s best-ever opportunity to do so however, for the venue chosen for the European Champions’ Cup Final was the Stadio Olimpico… in Rome. Yes, UEFA had allowed Roma’s home stadium to be the venue for a European Cup Final that Roma’s own team was to appear in. Although Liverpool was the team with by far the greater European pedigree, with home advantage it was Roma who went into the Final as the clear favourites to win.

But Liverpool won. After two hours of football had failed to separate the two teams, Liverpool’s nerve held better in the penalty shoot-out that followed, and they lifted the European Champions’ Cup for the fourth time.

Among the seventy thousand spectators in the Stadio Olimpico, there were approximately five thousand Liverpool supporters. When the shoot-out ended, they should have been in a state of joyous delirium. Instead, those who were there still recall being gripped by a sensation of real terror. The atmosphere around the rest of the stadium turned very, very ugly in just seconds as the Roma fans began to recognise the taste of bitter defeat. Knowing they were outnumbered by roughly thirteen-to-one, and noticing the waves of hostility emanating from their beaten rivals, many of the Liverpool supporters began to worry whether they would be able to escape the Eternal City with their lives.

They had good reason to worry.

Immediately upon getting out of the stadium, hundreds of Roma fans, most of them ‘Ultras’ (extreme fanatics) returned to where they had parked their cars, and from within, they retrieved weapons that had been concealed inside, including machetes. They then waited at the exit allocated to the Liverpool supporters, whom the police had kept from leaving the ground until after all the Italian fans were gone.

Almost as soon as the Liverpool supporters were allowed out of the stadium, the armed Ultras were upon them, hurling missiles at them, and slashing at them with knives. If the Liverpool supporters expected the police to help and protect them, they were to be sorely disappointed. Any appeal for help was met with police violence against the Liverpudlians, who found themselves being kicked and punched by officers who seemed to believe that the nationality of a football fan was all that mattered when establishing who was an aggressor.

For hours through the night that followed, terrified Liverpool fans tried to find a safe path through the city back to their hotels, repeatedly having to take refuge from blade-wielding, bloodthirsty motorcycle gangs, who were patrolling the streets to find Englishmen to take revenge upon on behalf of their team.

Many fans did make it to their hotels more or less unscathed, but for some of them, the nightmare did not end there. For some of the hotel owners suddenly refused them access to their rooms, fearing that to allow them in would make their hotels targets for further attacks. In the end, many of the Liverpool supporters had to go as far as to take refuge in the British Embassy.

No one had actually been killed during the ‘Night Of The Roman Knives’, but it was not for want of trying. Dozens were injured, and many were hospitalised.

The whole chapter of violence was met with expressions of outrage and shame in the Italian media the next day, but to the shock and anger of many Liverpudlians, there seemed to be an almost total blackout of coverage in the British press. The Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher, probably for political reasons, was stonily silent about it, failing even to go through the formality of registering an official complaint with the Italian Government – perhaps for fear of evoking sympathy for socialist Liverpool.

The upshot of this violent episode was two-fold;-

Firstly, people from Merseyside became increasingly convinced that they could not count on their own Government to protect them or to speak up for them when they were the victims of wrongdoing when abroad, and that in the event of future confrontations, they were going to have to look out for themselves, by any means necessary.

And secondly, those who had witnessed or become embroiled in the attacks swiftly developed a deeply-felt, generalised fear and resentment of Italian football fans. It was not a well-informed fear, nor was it a fear that would justify counter-violence, but it was entirely comprehensible.

So can anyone fail to imagine the reaction of at least some of the Liverpool fanbase a year later when, on qualifying for the Final again, they learned that their opponents at Heysel would be another Italian club – Juventus of Turin?

In the weeks leading up to the 1985 Final, UEFA made another bewildering decision, this time regarding ticketing arrangements. The seating areas in the stands would be allocated to neutrals and dignitaries, while the supporters of Liverpool and Juventus were allocated opposite ends of the stadium, sensibly enough. Each end of the Heysel Stadium had a semi-circular terrace, divided by wire fencing into three sections or ‘blocks’. All three blocks at the Juventus end of the stadium were awarded to the travelling Italian support. But the Liverpool contingent was (wrongly) expected to be much smaller, so they were only given two blocks at their end. It was decided that the third block, known as ‘Section Z’, should be used as another ‘neutral’ space for casual spectators. And tickets for this space were made freely available on the local market.

This was, to put it as politely as possible, an unwise decision.

In fact, to blazes with politeness, it was downright idiotic.

The problem was that the fixture was being held in Brussels, which had an enormous Italian expatriate community. Juventus was the most popular football team in Italy (and still is), so naturally enough, many of the expatriate Italians living in Brussels were Juventus supporters. So when tickets to a European Cup Final, featuring Juventus and to be played in Brussels, went on open sale on the Belgian market, guess whose hands most of them ended up in?

(Clue: Not Liverpool fans.)

(Another clue: Not neutrals either.)

The situation therefore was that on the terrace allocated to the fifteen thousand Liverpool supporters, one section with a capacity of over five thousand was going to be occupied in the main by Juventus supporters. And the two contingents were only going to be separated from each other by a thin length of chain-link fencing (‘chicken-wire’). Just a couple of yards from each other, and with many of the Liverpool supporters still haunted by memories of the dreadful treatment they had received in Rome a year earlier.

Hardly surprisingly, both Liverpool and Juventus protested to UEFA in the weeks before the Final that the arrangements were an invitation for trouble. But as was so often the case with UEFA when it faced objections to its policies, it just tried to deal with the difficulties highlighted by sneering at them.

A few days before the Final, Liverpool Football Club lodged another protest. Representatives of the club had finally been given a chance to survey the Heysel Stadium, and they were absolutely appalled by what they saw. The stadium was literally crumbling. The terraces at either end of the ground were just collections of cracks loosely-connected by stretches of decaying concrete. Walls looked barely capable of keeping out a light breeze. The stadium was entirely unsuited to its task. One or two officials at Liverpool seriously considered refusing to play the Final. But again, UEFA did not listen. Knowing that withdrawing from the Final would lead to repercussions, and probably considerable public criticism, Liverpool backed down, but with an ongoing air of trepidation.

For much of the day of the match, there seemed to be plenty of signs that the worries of the two clubs were unfounded. English and Italian supporters mingled freely and happily around the streets of Brussels, and the atmosphere was mainly celebratory. Much alcohol was consumed, but that only seemed to heighten the cheer. It was only as the sunny afternoon gave way to a humid evening that the mood began to darken. As more and more fans of both sides neared the stadium, suspicion began to replace friendliness. Rumours of minor clashes between rival groups of fans began circulating, and soon everyone was on their guard.

The major flashpoint outside the stadium was an ugly incident indeed, but also something of a misunderstanding. One Liverpool supporter bought a hot dog from a street-vendor, but apparently tried to pay for it in sterling. The vendor was not prepared to accept this, and demanded payment in francs. The Liverpool supporter did not have any local currency though, and so after a heated argument, eventually he just turned and walked away, hot-dog-and-all. The vendor was so angry that he did something that was bound to trigger unhappy memories of a year before – he drew a knife from his stall and slashed the Liverpool supporter with it.

Other red-shirted fans ran up to intervene, and the vendor was soon overpowered. But those who witnessed the confrontation only from a distance appear to have misinterpreted what they saw, and within minutes, the rumour was circulating rapidly around the outskirts of the Heysel Stadium that Juventus supporters had brought knives with them into Brussels, and that one of them had already stabbed a Liverpool fan. It was happening again, it seemed, the Italians were after Liverpool blood once more! Even though the vendor was almost certainly not a Juventus fan at all, suspicion began to give way to anxiety.

As fans of both sides reached the stadium, they shared the disgust the Liverpool club delegation had felt a few days earlier at the sight of a ground that looked like a reject project from a DIY television programme. Many of the Liverpool supporters had arrived without tickets, but this did not prove to be a major difficulty, as almost nobody manning the turnstiles made any attempt to check anybody’s ticket, nor to see whether they were carrying anything inappropriate such as weapons or alcohol. Some fans did not even go to the turnstiles – the cinder-block outer walls were so brittle that it was with very little effort that anyone wanting to get in could quite literally kick holes into them with their feet.

Belgian police at Heysel investigate a hole that has been kicked into the outer wall by ticketless fans. The stadium was so dilapidated that the cinder-block walls had become brittle and easily-breached.

The Liverpool fan contingent in the stadium, as it turned out, was not much smaller than the Juventus one after all, thanks to hundreds of fans getting in without tickets. But the Liverpool supporters were crammed into a smaller space than their Italian rivals, due to Section Z being allocated to ‘neutral’ spectators. On a hot, humid evening, the Liverpool fans found they were getting uncomfortably overcrowded, and this was not helping the general temper. They also found that on the other side of a flimsy chicken-wire fence, large numbers of Italian fans were starting to gather. The inaccurate rumours about a Juventus fan knifing a Liverpool fan outside the stadium were still circulating.

The exact flashpoint inside the stadium is still disputed to this day. As is so often the case with football fans, there is an undignified tone of “They-started-it-No-they-started-it!!!” from both sets of supporters, but what we do know is that there was a lot of missile-throwing back and forth over the fence for some minutes. It was not difficult for hooligans on either side to find missiles to throw – they simply had to crouch down and pick up a piece of the invariably-loose concrete from the ground, and then hurl it. What actually triggered this ‘concrete-badminton-match’ is not certain. It might just have been paranoia at standing so close to rivals, but one anecdote that a number of different Liverpool supporters agree on – and appear to have arrived at independently of each other – gives us the only known possible starting point for the riot.

One Liverpool supporter, who appeared to be only about fourteen years old, had somehow ended up standing in Section Z, surrounded by Italian fans. Liverpool supporters stood on the other side of the fence claimed that they saw the Italians beating the boy up, and that the Belgian police were just ignoring it – somewhat reminiscent of the Italian police a year earlier. The Liverpool fans further claimed that they started throwing missiles as it was the only way they could come to the boy’s aid with the fence in the way. When that failed – only provoking other Italians who had been minding their own business into throwing stones back – the Liverpool supporters started charging the fence in order to knock it down, and to intervene more directly.

(The story about the boy being attacked by Italians is on balance likely to be true, but it is not definitive, as nobody has ever been able to establish what happened to him. There was no dead body – he clearly was not one of the thirty-nine people who died running away from the riot – there is no obvious word of him on any of the hospital reports from that night, and he has never come forward in the twenty-eight years since to set the record straight. Therefore, while no alternative explanation has ever been offered for how the fighting began, this story should still be treated with a measure of caution.)

Stadium plan of Heysel, annotated to demonstrate which fans were where, and the movements at the start of the riot. (Please click on the image for a clearer view.)

Most of the Italians in Section Z only became aware that something serious was happening when the fence came down. They saw a small pocket of Liverpool supporters right where the fence had been standing suddenly charging forward in a group. They were repelled by the Juventus fans nearest to them, but after a moment charged again. Once more they were repelled, but with noticeably more difficulty. The Italian fans nearest the fallen fence were by now becoming increasingly frightened, while down by the pitchside, the Belgian police still seemed reluctant to step in and keep the peace. Then the Liverpool supporters charged again, and this time, the Juventus fans panicked. They broke up, turned and ran, heading along the width of Section Z towards the extreme end of the terrace, which was lined by a concrete wall. Many other fans were stood in their path, and startled by the sight of a fierce stampede of opposing fans heading their way, turned and ran as well. The more fans broke into a run, the more likelihood there was of confusion and of fans colliding with each other, and the less room there would be as they neared the end of the terrace. The decayed concrete broke up beneath the feet of many of the retreating Italians. This caused some of them to stumble and fall, to be inadvertently trampled on by fellow supporters immediately behind them. But the majority reached the wall at the far end, and soon there was a mad scramble of hundreds of people trying to climb over the wall or over the perimeter fences right at the front. People who had been standing immediately next to the wall were quickly swamped by a raging torrent of panicking supporters. Many were soon being crushed against the wall, while others were being crushed against each other, or trodden on by those trying to climb.

The deathly crush of spectators at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels. 39 died of asphyxiation and other crush injuries.

It was a sign of how awful a condition the stadium was in that the walls at the ends of the terraces did not have foundations, and indeed had not even been built into the surface of the terrace. Instead, they had been erected in place on the concrete over fifty years earlier and simply sealed into position (kind of) with a thick smear of cement. By the mid-1980’s of course, that cement had long-since decayed, and all that was holding the walls up was their own weight. Under the even greater weight of hundreds of panicked people pushing against it, such an unstable structure could not hold up for long. Sure enough, the wall at the end of the terrace gradually began to teeter over, and then collapsed altogether with a wince-inducing cracking noise that echoed all around the stadium. The teeming multitude of bodies that had been pressed to the wall toppled over as well, en masse. Under the chaotic pile-up of hundreds of squirming bodies, there was no room even for air to get in.

It is often assumed by some people that the collapse of the wall itself caused the deaths, possibly by falling on people, but there is a school of thought that suggests that the crush-pressure might well have been relieved by it instead, that the deaths were already certain by this point, and that the death-toll may even have been reduced by it. This is possibly true, but as large numbers of people collapsed into a pile-up, it seems likelier to me that the sideways pressure was simply replaced by the downward pressure of gravity and body-weight.

Whatever the case, thirty-nine people died of crush asphyxia while the TV cameras of the world were pointed at them. Hundreds more were injured.

The riot would carry on for several hours afterwards, mainly with Juventus fans at the other end of the ground flying into an understandable rage when news reached them of the deaths in Section Z. With the fighting at last calming down around two hours after the wall collapsed, the Final itself actually went ahead – UEFA had concluded that playing the game would be the only sure way of keeping the crowd occupied long enough to bring in reinforcements to help the police evacuate the stadium in some semblance of good order. For what it was worth, which was very, very little, Juventus won the game 1-0.

The Liverpool supporters had certainly never meant for anybody to die, and indeed some never even found out for some hours afterwards that anybody had died. So any cries of “Murderers!” are simply ignorant – either ignorant of what really happened at Heysel, or ignorant of the correct definition of murder i.e. a premeditated act deliberately and wilfully calculated to take a life. Nobody died in the fighting itself. And the blame for the riot cannot be laid exclusively at the door of the Liverpool supporters either. For instance, it is perfectly fair to argue that there was considerable vile behaviour by Juventus fans as well throughout the course of that evening, both before and after the crush. The appalling condition of the stadium played a huge role in the riot too, especially its crumbling terraces providing copious ammunition for missile-throwing, while the shambolic organisation of the event, especially the failure to control entry to the ground, and the spineless policing were major factors too. AS Roma fans have to take a slice of indirect responsibility as well, for their unprovoked knife-attacks on the Liverpool supporters the previous year. Now, to assume fans of Roma and Juventus are all just the same simply because they are both Italian clubs is like saying fans of Manchester United and Chelsea are all just the same simply because they are both English clubs. (It is to see fellowship between two sets of fans who, in reality, can hardly bear the sight of each other.) But even so, any layman from another country not au fait with the different rivalries within Italy is always going to have trouble seeing the difference, and the attacks were bound to leave a legacy in the victims of bitterness and paranoia towards Italian fans. Margaret Thatcher’s Government should also reflect on their own failure to respond to the fighting in Rome, as it left many Liverpool supporters convinced that they would have to take the law into their own hands in future. (It is therefore bitterly ironic how rabidly Thatcher reacted to Heysel, where the boot was on the other foot, as it were. Her attempt to explain away the Disaster took the form of making out that Liverpool was an unusually violent city, which seems an utterly perplexing notion, given the far higher rate of hooligan incidents among football fans in other English cities, especially London.) Above all, UEFA was greatly culpable too, for the insane decision to use so decrepit a stadium for such a prestigious event in the first place, and for the mindless ticketing arrangements that allowed rival fans to stand within yards of each other.

But even so, the Disaster itself i.e. the human crush that took thirty-nine lives had been triggered by a pocket of Liverpool supporters stampeding across the terrace to attack their rivals, and in terms of narrowly trying to establish the Disaster’s immediate, direct cause, the culpability doesultimately lie there. The reasons the Liverpool supporters did it are plausible, understandable, even forgivable eventually, even if they are not actually excusable or justified.

But they were not murderers, and those who try using that term to describe the rioters at Heysel usually do so for cynical reasons. Using a tragedy that cost nearly forty lives as ammunition for attacking a rival club, for instance. Those who do so might claim that they only wish to see justice for those who died, but it is usually very obvious when that is not the case, and it is also quite contemptible that anyone would take advantage of such horrors for the purposes of anything so petty.

 

[lapal_fan]

tldr

[Stevo985]

I read it.

 

But to be honest it's just a more detailed version of the account I already understood to be true. 

 

I've certainly never heard this myth that the article purports that Liverpool fans just went round murdering Juventus fans in that section. Maybe I'm too young to have heard that version.

[dont_do_it_doug.]

I read it.

 

But to be honest it's just a more detailed version of the account I already understood to be true. 

 

I've certainly never heard this myth that the article purports that Liverpool fans just went round murdering Juventus fans in that section. Maybe I'm too young to have heard that version.

 

I thought it was generally purported that the Liverpool fans acted without provocation, that what they did was particularly vicious even for English hooligans and that they were solely to blame for the deaths of 39 Juventus fans.

 

The events of Rome the previous season and the way that event was dealt with (as in not), the little flash points such as the slashing of a Liverpool fan outside the ground, the alleged beating of a young Liverpool fan in the "neutral section" (though this seems spurious to me) as well as the fact that there was a **** neutral section in the first place, in 1985(!), and the prevalence of hooliganism ACROSS THE GLOBE at the time created an atmosphere ready to ignite and it should be of no surprise that it did. I'd be a massive hypocrite to sit here as an Aston Villa fan, a fan of a club that holds people like Black Danny in some kind of regard, and not feel an ounce of understanding. It was a different time, a different world, football was a dangerous sport to follow. Fighting was inevitable. 

 

What was not inevitable was holding the game in a ground clearly not fit for purpose, even by 80's standards. UEFA have never been held accountable for this, it was all too easy to push the blame on to Liverpool fans who frankly did nothing "unusual" for the time as disgraceful as that may seem to us now. Thatcher was also too quick to jump on the bandwagon and blame the human element of a problem they had neither the time nor the care to want to fix. She was too busy snatching milk.  

 

These deaths were utterly preventable, much like Ibrox and Bradford before it and Hillsborough after it. It's a crying shame that rather than try and face up to the bigger picture and understand the event and why it happened it was all too easy to blame the "animals" and let it lie. Classic human. Even now, I hear things like Hillsborough being a karmic event, which is sickening to me. 

 

Maybe it was reported differently at the time, I don't know. All I know is how it is perceived now and I feel that Liverpool FC get a very rough ride regarding a very dark moment in history for human kind. 

Edited May 1, 2015 by dont_do_it_doug.