Twenty Years Ago

Twenty years ago today I was at Ewood Park watching Blackburn Rovers play Manchester City, we beat them 4:1. Both teams were battling for promotion and the result was amazing for Blackburn, but the result soon became insignificant.

It was traditional during the 1980s for fans to take transistor radios with them to keep up with the results of the day, and fifteen minutes into the game someone said that there was rioting between the Liverpool and Nottingham Forest fans, but now we know that this was wrong.

I came home from Ewood full of smug satisfaction that Rovers had convincingly beaten one of their main rivals for promotion, however that result soon paled into insignificance when I discovered that 96 fellow fans had gone to a football match and failed to come home.

The rumours of violence had been a mistake and because of one man's incompetence 96 fans died. If the incident had been in different circumstances, a death at factory because of an employers incompetence, then he would have been arrested and charged with corporate manslaughter. So with that in mind why hasn't the then chief of South Yorkshire Police been charged with corporate manslaughter? Isn't it about time that a new inquiry was opened and and the incident was investigated properly with an outcome that would do justice to the loss that was incurred by those families.

Now, as a father of four children and three daughters I particularly feel for Trevor and Jenny Hicks, who lost both their daughters, personally I can't even start to contemplate how they must have felt and dealt with that.

Although there was a "good" outcome to the deaths of the 96, all seater stadium, it shouldn't have happened. Fans were treated like animals during the 80s, that is a fact, electric fencing was actually suggested at Chelsea and at Oxford there was a fence that stretched the full length of the shed and reached from top to bottom. Thankfully those days are long gone.

Justice for the 96