My thoughts an heart goes out to the families of our beautiful 96 Angels. And to the people who where there who still suffer in silence
R.I.P. OUR 96 Angels keep shining down on us you will never be forgotton
R.i.p. our angels
61 posts
• Page 1 of 5 • 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
by Ciggy » Wed Apr 15, 2009 11:52 am
Forever in our thoughts, god bless you all.
Our 96 angels looking down from the sky.
Our 96 angels looking down from the sky.
There is no-one anywhere in the world at any stage who is any bigger or any better than this football club.
Kenny Dalglish 1/2/2011
REST IN PEACE PHIL, YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.
Kenny Dalglish 1/2/2011
REST IN PEACE PHIL, YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.
-
Ciggy - >> LFC Elite Member <<
- Posts: 26826
- Joined: Thu Jul 15, 2004 2:36 pm
by Ciggy » Wed Apr 15, 2009 1:58 pm
Just heart wrenching, terrible, just terrible.
DAVE Roberts is dressed in his Liverpool colours and stood proudly next to a portrait of the club’s legendary former manager, Bill Shankly.
Dave, a born and bred Kirkby lad, is a Liverpool football fanatic.
He is instantly likeable, fervent for his sport, and, as a happily married family man and father, ostensibly content.
It’s difficult to comprehend how one man’s passion could put him at the heart of something so horrific as the Hillsborough tragedy.
But Dave’s excitement for football, his pride in his colours, and his awe of the infamous Shankly, conceal an irreversible trauma from which he will never, ever recover.
Shankly, before he died in 1981, once claimed that the greatest day of the English football season was FA Cup semi-final day.
Disastrously, it would also be the day that devastated English football, and the spirit of the city of Liverpool, robbing the lives of 96, and shattering hundreds, if not thousands more.
On that very day, 15 April 1989, Dave found himself entangled in the deadliest stadium-related disaster in British history.
He was 29-years-old, with a nice new home, a new car, a loving wife and a young daughter.
But, that day, Dave’s faith in his beloved sport, and his idyllic existence, fell apart.
Hillsborough demolished his ability to function, his ability to live a meaningful life, and his passion for a game which had, for so long, been an integral part of his identity.
It was a good tie for Liverpool when they were drawn against Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final that year.
The very same fixture had taken place the year before – the Reds won 2-1 – and most Liverpool fans had no doubts their side would do it again.
Hillsborough, the home ground of Sheffield Wednesday, was a regular venue for FA Cup semi-finals during the 1980s, but it was not the safest of stands.
Nearly 40 people were injured during the 1981 semi-final between Tottenham Hotspur and Wolverhampton Wanderers, as a result of crushing, which prompted Sheffield Wednesday to alter the design.
Further concerns were raised, however, after the 1988 fixture, and a complaint was made by Liverpool football club after its fans also reported crushing.
Fatally, those concerns were ignored.
But it was no bother to Dave, and his two best friends, Joseph Clark and Alan McGlone, who were well-used to being pushed about in the stands.
‘The three of us, along with Joseph’s brother Stephen, all went to Hillsborough the year before, and we did everything the same. Liverpool won that one, and we knew they’d win this one, so we were in really, really high spirits,’ said Dave.
‘If we won this game, we’d get to go to Wembley again, and there was a very high chance we’d play Everton in the final. We’d been out with all of our friends in Liverpool the night before, half were Liverpool and half were Everton. The Everton fans were going to Villa Park to see them play Norwich City, and we were going to Hillsborough, and we said we’d all meet up on the way back, and we’d all go to Wembley together. We knew we were going to win,’ he said.
But when the group drove into Sheffield, they were immediately struck by what seemed to be a considerable lack of policing, particularly for a game of such significance.
‘When we had gone there the year before, as soon as we drove into Sheffield, there were police there, and they stopped the car and asked us if we were going to the match. When we said yes, they told us to put our headlights on when we drove into town, and the police would park us up. There were police all around the area, and on the way to the stadium, asking to see our tickets for the game. There was none of that in 1989,’ said Dave.
Football grounds, at the time, were mainly standing, and the group – true “Kopites”, having rarely missed a home game, and trailing their team through England and beyond – always got their spot in good time.
‘We got into the ground early – we always do,’ said Dave.
‘We get in there at about 1 pm or 1.15 pm so we can get a good place to see the match from. We found a really good spot, not far behind the goal. There were the three of us in there – me, Joseph and Alan, while Stephen was up in the stands above the Leppings Lane end. We were all singing songs, laughing and joking. We were in really high spirits, we knew Liverpool were going to win,’ he said.
It was about 15 minutes before the 3 pm kick-off that the anticipated crush started, but most were not unduly concerned.
‘We started getting pushed back and forward, back and forward,’ said Dave.
‘I don’t know how, but I got split up from Joseph and Alan. I was about five metres away from them. We kept pushing, back and forward, but then it just stopped. I had my back to the pitch, and I couldn’t move. Nobody could move at all, but still no-one was worried at the time.
‘A few minutes after, we were still getting crushed, and this guy next to me vomited. He vomited on another guy’s face, but he was so crushed, he couldn’t move to wipe it off. I still couldn’t move – I had my hands up to my chest – and the crowd was getting heavier and heavier.
‘I still had my back to the pitch, and everyone was shouting “Open the gate! Open the gate!” to a policeman. He didn’t know – nobody knew – he just kept saying no. Then something must have made him realise what was going on, and he opened the gate at the front. If I’d been standing just one step to the left or right, I’d not have been able to get out, as the people just poured in behind me, like water, and out onto the pitch. Even when I was standing on the pitch, I still didn’t realise what had happened. I could see Alan and Joseph at that point, they weren’t in any difficulty then. We were pointing at each other, and we were laughing.
‘I walked along the pitch-side, and it was all wire mesh then. And then I saw this guy’s head, just rocking. At first I thought he was unconscious. But then I realised. The mesh had pressed into his face, and his face was blue. He was dead. Then I immediately thought of my friends, they were my biggest concern. I ran back, and I could see them, and now they were in real difficulty.
‘I climbed up the railings and I tried to reach over, I thought I could pull them out, but I couldn’t reach them. I had no chance. They were shouting to me “Get me out! Get me out!”, but I couldn’t get to them. As I was reaching over, somebody else grabbed my hand, and shouted to me to pull him out. I tried to pull him over, and as I tried, he got crushed – he was crushed to death,’ he said.
That is what passion did to Dave.
It’s what passion did to reams of excited football fans, innocent boys, girls, men and women – 96 of whom would never leave that FA Cup semi-final alive.
Dave is deeply, deeply affected by what he saw that day, 20 years ago, and many tears are shed as he recounts, in horrific detail, the inexplicable carnage that completely destroyed his life.
‘I was in another state, a completely different state,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see my friends anymore. I climbed down from the railings, and everybody was shouting then “Stop the game! Stop the game!” Amid everything the game had started and we had barely noticed. I turned to see a policeman on the line, and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I knew then what was happening. I ran past him, pushed past him, and ran onto the pitch, and I ran straight up to the referee and I shouted “Ref! ref! You have to stop the game! People are dying!” He wouldn’t stop it at first, but then he must have had word from someone else, and he stopped it, it was six minutes in. I ran back to where my friends had been, but they weren’t there. I started helping people out of the stands but I couldn’t find my friends anywhere,’ said Dave.
Dave was one of the last people in the stadium that day. Determined to find his friends, and to pull others to safety, he helped carry injured fans out of the stand and to ambulances waiting outside.
‘It went on, and on. People were ripping down railings and using it as makeshift stretchers. I saw a boy there, he can’t have been older than eight or nine years old. He had been there with his dad, and his dad’s friends, and he was dead on the pitch. There was a St John’s Ambulance man trying to resuscitate him, trying and trying, and his dad and the friends were all singing Liverpool songs at the top of their voice, doing everything they could to wake him up. I just kept helping people out, helping people out, until the whole pen was empty. I still couldn’t find my friends. There were no mobile phones then, so I walked back to car, and Stephen, Joseph’s brother, was waiting.
‘I have to say the people of Sheffield were absolutely fantastic in the circumstances. They’d obviously heard about it on the news, and they wouldn’t let us walk past their houses without stopping in for a cup of tea to calm down, and to use their phones to call who we needed to.
‘After we walked back to the car, we waited, and waited, but there was still no sign of Joseph and Alan. So we walked past somebody’s house, and they had the news on, and it said that anybody who couldn’t find friends or relatives should go to the General Hospital. We made our way there and we were there for three or four hours, before they started reading out descriptions of people, and the clothes they were wearing.
‘As this went on, there was still no sign of our friends. Then, at about 10 pm, they told us that anyone who was still missing someone would be taken back to the ground, because the gymnasium next door was being used as a makeshift morgue.
‘They took us there in a double-decker bus. When we got off the bus, we had to go into a room, it was about six foot by six foot, and on the wall were Polaroid pictures of all the people who had been brought in, all the people who had died.
‘We saw Joseph’s picture first. Stephen just collapsed on the floor. They went to take us out, but I said, I have to look to see if my other friend is there! A few rows down, there was Alan’s picture. We had to go straight through and identify the bodies. They pulled the cover back, and it was our two friends,’ said Dave.
Ten years ago, Dave would never have been able to talk so candidly about the tragedy that marred English football, and about the deaths of his two best friends, Joseph Clark and Alan McGlone.
‘It changed my whole life,’ he says.
‘I was married, with a brand new house, a brand new car, and a nine-year-old daughter who I absolutely doted on.
‘I had a nervous breakdown, and I lost it all. I went to see a psychiatrist. For the first three years, I felt guilty. I felt it was my fault that I couldn’t save my two friends. After that, I felt angry at what happened. I couldn’t talk about it for a long time.’
Following a rescheduled match at Old Trafford, Liverpool did progress to the FA Cup final that year, as did Everton.
The Reds scored in extra time to win the Cup 3-2, but Dave didn’t go to Wembley.
‘I didn’t go to a football match for two years after that, and even since, I’ve never been any other ground apart from Anfield,’ he says.
It was an unexpected offer of solace from an old friend, now living in Jersey, which marked a huge turning point in Dave’s ability to pick up the pieces of his life and start to come to terms with what had happened to him.
‘One of my friends who used to live in Kirkby was now living in Jersey, and he was back in Liverpool for a funeral. He asked me if I wanted to move there for a bit. He said he’d sort me out with a job, and somewhere to stay. I asked my psychiatrist what he thought and he said to me “go for it”. It was the best decision I made. I spent six years here, and then I went to work in Hong Kong, where I met my wife. We had two daughters and then we decided to move back to Jersey almost two years ago, and this is where we plan to stay. The whole family is very happy here,’ he says.
For Dave, happy memories will always be tainted by what happened on 15 April 1989, 20 years ago today, when 96 people lost their lives, and the lives of hundreds, if not thousands more, changed forever.
Each year, on the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, Dave inevitably ponders what might have been.
But for the most part, he likes to remember the way things were, recalling the faces of his friends, and the way used to be, when they’d make their regular trips to Anfield, and follow their team all over the country.
True, dedicated Kopites, with an interminable passion for their side, for their city, and for their football.
‘My psychiatrist told me I will never get over what happened, but I will learn to deal with it,’ says Dave.
‘I’m not angry anymore. Sometimes I can think about things with a smile on my face, because we had some fantastic times together, and since they’ve gone I’ve spent some great times with their children. I still keep in touch with their families, very much so.
‘But mostly, when I think about it, I feel sad. For years after I had this recurring dream. I’m helping people out of the stand, helping them out, helping them out, and then I pick this person out, and it’s me.
‘I haven’t had that dream now for 12 months, but it’s something that has affected my entire life. It’s a terrible, terrible thing that happened at Hillsborough that day, and what I saw, I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,’ he says.
Two decades on, Liverpool is still coming to terms with what happened on 15 April 1989.
At 3.06 pm today, at Anfield, and across the world, families, players and supporters will fall silent for two minutes, exactly 20 years since that ill-fated semi-final was abandoned, before the words of Liverpool’s famous anthem You Will Never Walk Alone are sung.
Dave usually likes to spend some time alone, on the anniversary of Hillsborough.
At some point today, he will pull up a chair in a quiet corner of his local pub, and he’ll order himself a pint, and two shots of whisky.
As he drinks the pint, and the two shots of whisky, he will make a toast to each of his friends, to Joseph Clark, and to Alan McGlone.
To his two best friends, who went to watch a football match… and who never came home.
by Kathryn Lundy
DAVE Roberts is dressed in his Liverpool colours and stood proudly next to a portrait of the club’s legendary former manager, Bill Shankly.
Dave, a born and bred Kirkby lad, is a Liverpool football fanatic.
He is instantly likeable, fervent for his sport, and, as a happily married family man and father, ostensibly content.
It’s difficult to comprehend how one man’s passion could put him at the heart of something so horrific as the Hillsborough tragedy.
But Dave’s excitement for football, his pride in his colours, and his awe of the infamous Shankly, conceal an irreversible trauma from which he will never, ever recover.
Shankly, before he died in 1981, once claimed that the greatest day of the English football season was FA Cup semi-final day.
Disastrously, it would also be the day that devastated English football, and the spirit of the city of Liverpool, robbing the lives of 96, and shattering hundreds, if not thousands more.
On that very day, 15 April 1989, Dave found himself entangled in the deadliest stadium-related disaster in British history.
He was 29-years-old, with a nice new home, a new car, a loving wife and a young daughter.
But, that day, Dave’s faith in his beloved sport, and his idyllic existence, fell apart.
Hillsborough demolished his ability to function, his ability to live a meaningful life, and his passion for a game which had, for so long, been an integral part of his identity.
It was a good tie for Liverpool when they were drawn against Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final that year.
The very same fixture had taken place the year before – the Reds won 2-1 – and most Liverpool fans had no doubts their side would do it again.
Hillsborough, the home ground of Sheffield Wednesday, was a regular venue for FA Cup semi-finals during the 1980s, but it was not the safest of stands.
Nearly 40 people were injured during the 1981 semi-final between Tottenham Hotspur and Wolverhampton Wanderers, as a result of crushing, which prompted Sheffield Wednesday to alter the design.
Further concerns were raised, however, after the 1988 fixture, and a complaint was made by Liverpool football club after its fans also reported crushing.
Fatally, those concerns were ignored.
But it was no bother to Dave, and his two best friends, Joseph Clark and Alan McGlone, who were well-used to being pushed about in the stands.
‘The three of us, along with Joseph’s brother Stephen, all went to Hillsborough the year before, and we did everything the same. Liverpool won that one, and we knew they’d win this one, so we were in really, really high spirits,’ said Dave.
‘If we won this game, we’d get to go to Wembley again, and there was a very high chance we’d play Everton in the final. We’d been out with all of our friends in Liverpool the night before, half were Liverpool and half were Everton. The Everton fans were going to Villa Park to see them play Norwich City, and we were going to Hillsborough, and we said we’d all meet up on the way back, and we’d all go to Wembley together. We knew we were going to win,’ he said.
But when the group drove into Sheffield, they were immediately struck by what seemed to be a considerable lack of policing, particularly for a game of such significance.
‘When we had gone there the year before, as soon as we drove into Sheffield, there were police there, and they stopped the car and asked us if we were going to the match. When we said yes, they told us to put our headlights on when we drove into town, and the police would park us up. There were police all around the area, and on the way to the stadium, asking to see our tickets for the game. There was none of that in 1989,’ said Dave.
Football grounds, at the time, were mainly standing, and the group – true “Kopites”, having rarely missed a home game, and trailing their team through England and beyond – always got their spot in good time.
‘We got into the ground early – we always do,’ said Dave.
‘We get in there at about 1 pm or 1.15 pm so we can get a good place to see the match from. We found a really good spot, not far behind the goal. There were the three of us in there – me, Joseph and Alan, while Stephen was up in the stands above the Leppings Lane end. We were all singing songs, laughing and joking. We were in really high spirits, we knew Liverpool were going to win,’ he said.
It was about 15 minutes before the 3 pm kick-off that the anticipated crush started, but most were not unduly concerned.
‘We started getting pushed back and forward, back and forward,’ said Dave.
‘I don’t know how, but I got split up from Joseph and Alan. I was about five metres away from them. We kept pushing, back and forward, but then it just stopped. I had my back to the pitch, and I couldn’t move. Nobody could move at all, but still no-one was worried at the time.
‘A few minutes after, we were still getting crushed, and this guy next to me vomited. He vomited on another guy’s face, but he was so crushed, he couldn’t move to wipe it off. I still couldn’t move – I had my hands up to my chest – and the crowd was getting heavier and heavier.
‘I still had my back to the pitch, and everyone was shouting “Open the gate! Open the gate!” to a policeman. He didn’t know – nobody knew – he just kept saying no. Then something must have made him realise what was going on, and he opened the gate at the front. If I’d been standing just one step to the left or right, I’d not have been able to get out, as the people just poured in behind me, like water, and out onto the pitch. Even when I was standing on the pitch, I still didn’t realise what had happened. I could see Alan and Joseph at that point, they weren’t in any difficulty then. We were pointing at each other, and we were laughing.
‘I walked along the pitch-side, and it was all wire mesh then. And then I saw this guy’s head, just rocking. At first I thought he was unconscious. But then I realised. The mesh had pressed into his face, and his face was blue. He was dead. Then I immediately thought of my friends, they were my biggest concern. I ran back, and I could see them, and now they were in real difficulty.
‘I climbed up the railings and I tried to reach over, I thought I could pull them out, but I couldn’t reach them. I had no chance. They were shouting to me “Get me out! Get me out!”, but I couldn’t get to them. As I was reaching over, somebody else grabbed my hand, and shouted to me to pull him out. I tried to pull him over, and as I tried, he got crushed – he was crushed to death,’ he said.
That is what passion did to Dave.
It’s what passion did to reams of excited football fans, innocent boys, girls, men and women – 96 of whom would never leave that FA Cup semi-final alive.
Dave is deeply, deeply affected by what he saw that day, 20 years ago, and many tears are shed as he recounts, in horrific detail, the inexplicable carnage that completely destroyed his life.
‘I was in another state, a completely different state,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see my friends anymore. I climbed down from the railings, and everybody was shouting then “Stop the game! Stop the game!” Amid everything the game had started and we had barely noticed. I turned to see a policeman on the line, and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and I knew then what was happening. I ran past him, pushed past him, and ran onto the pitch, and I ran straight up to the referee and I shouted “Ref! ref! You have to stop the game! People are dying!” He wouldn’t stop it at first, but then he must have had word from someone else, and he stopped it, it was six minutes in. I ran back to where my friends had been, but they weren’t there. I started helping people out of the stands but I couldn’t find my friends anywhere,’ said Dave.
Dave was one of the last people in the stadium that day. Determined to find his friends, and to pull others to safety, he helped carry injured fans out of the stand and to ambulances waiting outside.
‘It went on, and on. People were ripping down railings and using it as makeshift stretchers. I saw a boy there, he can’t have been older than eight or nine years old. He had been there with his dad, and his dad’s friends, and he was dead on the pitch. There was a St John’s Ambulance man trying to resuscitate him, trying and trying, and his dad and the friends were all singing Liverpool songs at the top of their voice, doing everything they could to wake him up. I just kept helping people out, helping people out, until the whole pen was empty. I still couldn’t find my friends. There were no mobile phones then, so I walked back to car, and Stephen, Joseph’s brother, was waiting.
‘I have to say the people of Sheffield were absolutely fantastic in the circumstances. They’d obviously heard about it on the news, and they wouldn’t let us walk past their houses without stopping in for a cup of tea to calm down, and to use their phones to call who we needed to.
‘After we walked back to the car, we waited, and waited, but there was still no sign of Joseph and Alan. So we walked past somebody’s house, and they had the news on, and it said that anybody who couldn’t find friends or relatives should go to the General Hospital. We made our way there and we were there for three or four hours, before they started reading out descriptions of people, and the clothes they were wearing.
‘As this went on, there was still no sign of our friends. Then, at about 10 pm, they told us that anyone who was still missing someone would be taken back to the ground, because the gymnasium next door was being used as a makeshift morgue.
‘They took us there in a double-decker bus. When we got off the bus, we had to go into a room, it was about six foot by six foot, and on the wall were Polaroid pictures of all the people who had been brought in, all the people who had died.
‘We saw Joseph’s picture first. Stephen just collapsed on the floor. They went to take us out, but I said, I have to look to see if my other friend is there! A few rows down, there was Alan’s picture. We had to go straight through and identify the bodies. They pulled the cover back, and it was our two friends,’ said Dave.
Ten years ago, Dave would never have been able to talk so candidly about the tragedy that marred English football, and about the deaths of his two best friends, Joseph Clark and Alan McGlone.
‘It changed my whole life,’ he says.
‘I was married, with a brand new house, a brand new car, and a nine-year-old daughter who I absolutely doted on.
‘I had a nervous breakdown, and I lost it all. I went to see a psychiatrist. For the first three years, I felt guilty. I felt it was my fault that I couldn’t save my two friends. After that, I felt angry at what happened. I couldn’t talk about it for a long time.’
Following a rescheduled match at Old Trafford, Liverpool did progress to the FA Cup final that year, as did Everton.
The Reds scored in extra time to win the Cup 3-2, but Dave didn’t go to Wembley.
‘I didn’t go to a football match for two years after that, and even since, I’ve never been any other ground apart from Anfield,’ he says.
It was an unexpected offer of solace from an old friend, now living in Jersey, which marked a huge turning point in Dave’s ability to pick up the pieces of his life and start to come to terms with what had happened to him.
‘One of my friends who used to live in Kirkby was now living in Jersey, and he was back in Liverpool for a funeral. He asked me if I wanted to move there for a bit. He said he’d sort me out with a job, and somewhere to stay. I asked my psychiatrist what he thought and he said to me “go for it”. It was the best decision I made. I spent six years here, and then I went to work in Hong Kong, where I met my wife. We had two daughters and then we decided to move back to Jersey almost two years ago, and this is where we plan to stay. The whole family is very happy here,’ he says.
For Dave, happy memories will always be tainted by what happened on 15 April 1989, 20 years ago today, when 96 people lost their lives, and the lives of hundreds, if not thousands more, changed forever.
Each year, on the anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, Dave inevitably ponders what might have been.
But for the most part, he likes to remember the way things were, recalling the faces of his friends, and the way used to be, when they’d make their regular trips to Anfield, and follow their team all over the country.
True, dedicated Kopites, with an interminable passion for their side, for their city, and for their football.
‘My psychiatrist told me I will never get over what happened, but I will learn to deal with it,’ says Dave.
‘I’m not angry anymore. Sometimes I can think about things with a smile on my face, because we had some fantastic times together, and since they’ve gone I’ve spent some great times with their children. I still keep in touch with their families, very much so.
‘But mostly, when I think about it, I feel sad. For years after I had this recurring dream. I’m helping people out of the stand, helping them out, helping them out, and then I pick this person out, and it’s me.
‘I haven’t had that dream now for 12 months, but it’s something that has affected my entire life. It’s a terrible, terrible thing that happened at Hillsborough that day, and what I saw, I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy,’ he says.
Two decades on, Liverpool is still coming to terms with what happened on 15 April 1989.
At 3.06 pm today, at Anfield, and across the world, families, players and supporters will fall silent for two minutes, exactly 20 years since that ill-fated semi-final was abandoned, before the words of Liverpool’s famous anthem You Will Never Walk Alone are sung.
Dave usually likes to spend some time alone, on the anniversary of Hillsborough.
At some point today, he will pull up a chair in a quiet corner of his local pub, and he’ll order himself a pint, and two shots of whisky.
As he drinks the pint, and the two shots of whisky, he will make a toast to each of his friends, to Joseph Clark, and to Alan McGlone.
To his two best friends, who went to watch a football match… and who never came home.
by Kathryn Lundy
There is no-one anywhere in the world at any stage who is any bigger or any better than this football club.
Kenny Dalglish 1/2/2011
REST IN PEACE PHIL, YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.
Kenny Dalglish 1/2/2011
REST IN PEACE PHIL, YOU WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN.
-
Ciggy - >> LFC Elite Member <<
- Posts: 26826
- Joined: Thu Jul 15, 2004 2:36 pm
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