by Jerry St Clair »
20 Apr 2009 12:21
working class hero I accept this. But sadly fans were part of the problem. If fans without tickets had not been there then the police would not have panicked. Is it possible to have a justice where fans are seen as a part of the problem - or is justice only to be found in the complete exoneration of the fans and the vilification of the authorities?
FWIW I believe the authorities made a number of decisions which [with the benefit of hindsight] were catastrophic. But can any fan really say there woiuld not have been a similar claim if the gate had not been opened and fans were crushed outside? As a Liverpool supporting mate put it 'at least the dead then wouldn't have been the ones who had a right to be there...'
Sigh.
You're making a massively incorrect assumption about the crush outside. There is no evidence that significant numbers of fans arrived without tickets. The crush outside was caused by woefully inadequate number of turnstiles (about 14 for 27,000 people, of which two were broken and others weren't functioning propoerly) and an absence of crowd management on the approach to Leppings Lane. Liverpool fans for the side stand were also directed towards Leppings Lane.
Your Liverpool supporting mate is totally wrong about who died. Those arriving at the back on the pens, many of whom had come in through Gate C, ended up at the front of the terrace in a "continuous river of humanity". This was mainly due tot he failure of a crush barrier at the front of the terrace, which effectively left a clear path from the back to the front. Witnesses report being carried from the back of the terrace to the front without any control over their movements. The largest number of dead were in the vicinity of this failed barrier, and many of those had come in through Gate C. A statement that implies that those at coming in at the back crushed those at the front against the fences, displays a total lack of understanding of what went on in the pens.
And, let's not forget that the Leppings Lane terrace , as a whole, was not over capacity at any point. Again, this debunks the myth that there were thousands of ticketless fans in there.
