The first time I attended a professional football game in England was August 23, 1972. Chelsea against Liverpool at Stamford Bridge. Sixteen English, three Scots, two Welsh and one Irish player. So much was different back then and it is not the absence of overseas players that springs to mind.
It was a trip my friend Tony and I had planned for months. I had turned 17, he was a year younger. We lived in a corner of southeast Ireland, so far and so detached that the old First Division seemed like Mecca. How this trip for two unchaperoned teenagers was sanctioned, only God knows. Back in the 20th century parents did not worry so much. Bless their innocence.
We wanted to fly to London but the airfare was £282, which was about £250 more than we could afford. So it was the ferry from Rosslare to Fishguard and a long, slow train to London. That was the first time I needed a passport.
The 1972-73 season was a good one for Liverpool. They won the league and the Uefa Cup. That evening at Stamford Bridge they beat Chelsea 2-1. This was the team of Ray Clemence and Tommy Smith, Larry Lloyd and the late Emlyn Hughes, Kevin Keegan and John Toshack.
Much fades with time but not the excitement that fizzed around the ground whenever the late Peter Osgood got on the ball. He had something that no player, not even Keegan, had that evening. The other memory is of how comfortable it felt to walk to the ground, watch the game, talk with strangers about the play and not for a moment think anything could go wrong.
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Everything changed in the years afterwards. Fan violence became a part of the culture, accepted but not acceptable. Hooliganism was an English problem and it turns out that on Saturday afternoon, Mecca could become Hell in the blink of an eyelid.
I changed countries in the late 1990s, went from attending games in the old League of Ireland to the Premier League. By then the Bradford, Heysel and Hillsborough disasters had happened, taking the lives of 191 football supporters, and so much changed. Stadiums were made safer, and policing became intelligent.
“The families reminded us that football fans are human beings. They always were. They always will be
Most of all, attitudes changed. Fans silently accepted that they, too, were responsible for the safety of others. You see it inside and outside the ground. On the trains to and from games they sing and chant but they know where the line is and they do not cross it. But when a section of people are stigmatised, it takes a long time for it to disappear.
When going to Premier League games became a weekly part of my work, people in Ireland would ask what it was like. The thing that always struck this latecomer to English football was the ordinariness of those going to and from the ground. Father and son, father and daughter, elderly man on his own, mother and son, mates from work, mates from the pub, Japanese couples in Manchester United tops.
Football crossed social, economic, religious and ethnic boundaries better than any other sport. Some will say greater diversity came with the Premier League’s extraordinary popularity but football was never a game for one class.
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This is the very thing that strikes you reading about the 96 who perished on April 15, 1989, at Hillsborough. David Conn, the journalist who has done so much to tell the story of the tragedy and the families’ pursuit of justice, wrote this of the 96 in The Guardian: “They came from all walks of life: working-class, middle-class, wealthy, hard-up, from Liverpool, the Midlands, London and around the country.
They included a heartbreakingly large number of young people — 37 were teenagers — because to watch an FA Cup semi-final then cost only £6. They were sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, one wife — Christine Jones, 27 — and partners. Twenty-five were fathers; one, 38-year-old Inger Shah, was a single mother with two teenagers: altogether, 58 children lost a parent.”
“For though one might forgive the mistakes that were made on the day, it is much more difficult to accept the smear campaign and the cover-up
David Duckenfield, the police officer in command on that day in Hillsborough, admitted in his evidence at the inquest that his focus before the match was on dealing with misbehaviour. He had not considered the need to protect fans from the possibility of overcrowding or crushing.
That is what stigmatisation does, and from that starting point lots of bad things follow. There will of course now be the criminal cases and the civil cases, and it is right these should follow. For though one might forgive the mistakes that were made on the day, it is much more difficult to accept the smear campaign, the cover-up and the persistent lying that followed.
There is also the question of why Sheffield Wednesday and the Football Association failed to act on warnings from previous big games at Hillsborough and did not address the safety issues that would underpin the disaster. Fearful of saying things that might compromise potential legal action of the future, the FA has behaved timidly throughout the entire process. It is just not good enough.
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Those who fought the long fight, and could not afford the luxury of timidity, have now got their just deserts. The 96 supporters were unlawfully killed and their fellow fans were in no way to blame for what happened. Those are two momentous conclusions.
The families will have been struck by the extent of the gratitude that ordinary people, football supporters and even many beyond the game feel for what they have done.
They tended their cause as the heartbroken tend a grave. What they did was the ultimate expression of love. They have left us a monument greater than any Champions League trophy and football is now a better place because of their persistence and unyielding conviction.
They reminded us that football fans are human beings. They always were. They always will be.
Empty seats mirror Wenger’s empty boasts
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Someone from Arsenal should write to the head of communications in Kim Jong-un’s office in Pyongyang and have a quiet word. The supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea enjoys mass rallies and likes to hold them in sports stadiums. Every time the poor man has got to find a way of packing them in.
Kim Jong-un and his aides have been very good at this. Not an empty seat and so much fervour for the home team. Come on you reds! Arsenal have found an easier way round this stadium question. Whatever the crowd, you record it as close to capacity. You then produce a crowd number that is official and proof of a stadium 97% full.
When someone asks about the thousands of empty seats, you say those seats were paid for and thus are considered occupied. It’s an impressive leap, like a pupil presenting a blank page to his teacher and saying it’s there, written in invisible ink.
The person who is not sitting on that seat, who has not come to the game, who is not cheering for the team, is actually part of the official attendance figure. I’m not sure even North Korea would try this.
You may say this is not the time to criticise Arsenal and their much-put-upon manager, Arsène Wenger, but that corporate decision to count stayaways as attendees is symptomatic of the denial that now defines the club.
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Qualifying for the Champions League was never a trophy. Arsenal, as Leicester City remind us, were never victims of financial doping. Most of the team just weren’t nearly good enough.
In recent years Wenger retained the backing of enough supporters by emphasising the promise of a young team he overrated. In his native France they speak of the eternal espoir in sport — those athletes who are forever promising. Wenger could sell you a small army of these guys, telling you they need just a little more time. That song grew old and the manager doesn’t sing it so much now.
The difficulty for anyone trying to take Arsenal forward is who to begin with. You could make a case for any of the eternal espoirs — Hector Bellerin, Calum Chambers, Aaron Ramsey, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Theo Walcott, Kieran Gibbs, Jack Wilshere. A case to keep them, and a case to sell them.
The disappointment is that a great Arsenal manager, who once drove the club forward, is now holding them back. His failure to accept responsibility, at least for the past five years when lack of financial resources wasn’t such an issue, has diminished him in the eyes of the team’s supporters, as has his inability to build a team in which they can believe.
Even Wenger must now accept that he doesn’t have a team who will win the Premier League. Instead of promising things will be better next season, he speaks of how the banks needed him to commit to Arsenal before agreeing to make the loans necessary to fund the new stadium. He speaks of the clubs he turned down to stay at Arsenal.
But he knew then that to keep his job he would have to keep Arsenal at the top, or close enough to it, that people didn’t stop believing.
This season an awful Chelsea, a mediocre Manchester United and an inconsistent Manchester City opened the door wide open for Arsenal. But like petulant boys unwilling to do as they were told, they stayed outside.
Chelsea and Manchester City will have new managers next season. Manchester United will probably have a new manager. The team who most needs change is Wenger’s but no one expects him to lose his job. There is, it seems, at least one more disappointing season left in this story.
