For British football, the 1970s and 1980s were bitter-sweet days. English clubs dominated European football, winning the European Cup seven years out of eight from 1977. But the game was blighted by hooliganism, slum stadiums and a series of tragedies. The darkest day came 20 years ago today with the shocking Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool FC fans were crushed to death at an FA Cup semi-final.
That Liverpool should be involved was a terrible irony. Four years before, the club's supporters had run riot at the European Cup final at the Heysel stadium in Brussels, killing dozens of Juventus fans. That shameful event led to a ban on English clubs playing in European competitions for five years. It surely also contributed to the initial assumption - swiftly disproved - that Liverpool's fans were on the rampage at Hillsborough, rather than trying to escape a horrible death.
This morning, I was moved by BBC sports reporter Alan Green's account of the tragedy on Radio 4's Today programme. Green was a junior reporter at the time, assisting the BBC's veteran commentator Peter Jones. Jones and Green had gone to Sheffield in 1989 to commentate on a football match. Instead, they provided a vivid account as the scale of the disaster unfolded. Green's experience as a news reporter in Belfast proved a grimly appropriate apprenticeship for that afternoon's work for BBC Radio 2's sports programme. (These were the days before Radio 5 Live.)
Like many others, I heard the news back in 1989 from Jones and Green's reports. I was spending the weekend in Looe in Cornwall, where my parents had rented a bungalow for the week. The Friday was a beautiful spring day, but the Saturday was wet and gloomy. Dad and I went for a drive along the coast to Seaton (Cornwall), where we had spent many happy hours back in the hot summer of 1976. That wet April Saturday, we found a bleak scene at Seaton: the pool where I had paddled had gone, and the rain swept across the beach. It seemed an appropriate backdrop to hear the appalling news from Sheffield.
Later that day, the BBC's Match of the Day became an inquest, as presenter Jimmy Hill and his guests debated how football could recover. The Taylor report recommended all seater stadiums - ending the tradition of standing on terraces such as Ninian Park's Bob Bank. The proposal wasn't universally supported, but after Hillsborough no one was in a mood to argue. The high fences - designed to keep in hooligans but lethal at Hillsborough - were torn down. Within just a few years, football had entered a new era of popularity and commercial success. Many feel uncomfortable at the enormous amount footballers now earn, and the way Sky TV has bought the soul of the game. But it's surely better than that awful era when people lost their lives in the simple act of going to watch the football in Sheffield, Brussels, Bradford and Glasgow.
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