Liverpool FC Forum

[markeeeebeeee]

Hi All,

Villa fan here, just wanted to wish you all the best in this very difficult week. I have been listening to and reading some of the reports of this tragedy and I cannot imagine what people affected by it are going through.

Mark

[dawson99]

Everyone should check out football focus on bbc sports website...


Hillsborough remembered - John Aldridge

Hillsborough remembered - Steven Gerrard

There are others as well, Des Lynam and others.

[Number 9]

Everyone should check out football focus on bbc sports website...


Hillsborough remembered - John Aldridge

Hillsborough remembered - Steven Gerrard

There are others as well, Des Lynam and others.

Cheers Dawson I never seen them!
Just watched the Aldridge and Hansen one!  

I hope its comfort to the families to hear ex reds talk like that from the heart!

[Greavesie]

[Dark Lochnagar]

On my behalf as an Ayr United fan, can I wish you all my very best wishes on the 20th Anniversary of Hillsborough.

I remember watching it on the TV and even now a tear falls when I watch repeats.

All the best from a hairy ersed Scotsman and YOU WILL never walk alone.

[Sabre]

I'm relatively satisfied about how the Spanish press are showing respect to the 96.

Unfortunately back then the story thas was told in my country had little to do with the Truth, our national press didn't do enough to contrast the information that was given by official british agencies. While they haven't reviewed what they told the Spanish readers back then, at least now they have told the story more faithful to reality, blaming the security measures and considering Liverpool fans victims, not part of the problem in the tragedy.

[GYBS]

Meanwhile there is yet another personal story, centred around ex-Liverpool keeper Paul Harrison, who lost his father and uncle in the tragedy. If you have any tears left...

Four-year-old Paul Harrison fools around on the couch with the father he adores.

But just seven days after this touching family moment was captured, his dad Gary was dead.

Gary, just 27, perished at Hillsborough with his 31-year-old brother Stephen – Paul’s uncle.

Paul thinks about his dad every day, and the moments and milestones he has missed.

Especially the day Paul signed as a goalkeeper for Liverpool, the club he had grown up following and the one his father had lived – and died – supporting.

Speaking exclusively to the Mirror ahead of tomorrow’s 20th anniversary of the disaster, Paul, now 24, said: “When my dad and my Uncle Steve died I made a promise to myself that I would become a professional footballer.

“It was always my dream as a kid to become a footie player, but those events spurred me on.

“The day I signed professional forms with Liverpool was the proudest moment of my life.

“I was 19 and the manager Gerard Houllier put the contract in front of me and I had tears in my eyes.

“I felt my dad and uncle were there with me. They would have been so proud. Every time I pull on a football shirt, regardless who for, I go out and play for them.”

Gary, an industrial cleaner, was Liverpool-mad, and never missed a match with his brother Stephen. Tickets for that fateful FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest on April 15, 1989, were like gold dust, but Gary wangled a couple.

Paul wanted to join them but his dad gently explained he was too young and could watch it on TV instead. Paul says: “My dad and Uncle

Steve would not have missed that game for the world. I remember them setting off early as they wanted to get a good spot. Dad was convinced we’d see off Forest and go on to win the Cup. He was so excited.” But soon after kick-off, Liverpool fans were dying. Gary and Stephen were among the 2,000 fans crammed in the central pen of the Leppings Lane end.

Police then threw open the main entrance gate and more fans piled in, unaware they were crushing the people in front of them to death.

Young Paul had been knocking a football about with his mates outside and wandered into the living room shortly after kick-off.

He found his mum Karen watching the chaos unfolding on the television in sheer horror.

Paul was just four years old but he remembers it vividly. He says: “When I ran in, my mum was just sitting there in shock, glued to the box.

There was chaos on the telly with hundreds of people on the pitch. Fans were climbing over fences in the Leppings Lane end and some people were passed out on the grass – it was a surreal sight.

“I didn’t fully understand what was going on but I realised something terrible had happened.”

As news of fatalities began to filter through, Paul’s nan Joan and grandad Paul rushed around to the family home in Belle Vale, Liverpool, anxious for news on Gary and Stephen. They were hoping against hope they were safe, but dreading the worst.

Paul says: “The phone was ringing off the hook with friends and family asking mum if she’d heard anything. My sister Clare, who was eight, was in tears. I think she knew.”

Later that evening, after hours of phoning Hillsborough helplines and waiting desperately for news, Karen left Paul and Clare with their grandparents and travelled to Sheffield with her brother Jimmy.

The pair scoured the hospitals but, with no sign of the brothers, they checked the mortuary.

It was Jimmy who identified the bodies.

Paul says: “I couldn’t believe my dad wasn’t coming home from a football match. So I waited for him to walk through the door.

“It wasn’t until a week later that I realised he wasn’t coming back and Hillsborough had taken him away from me for good. My mum had lost the love of her life and had to tell us that daddy wasn’t coming home. But she never broke down in front of us, she was so strong.

“I’ll never know how she coped, I admire her with all my heart for the way she dealt with things during such a difficult time.

“My mum made me write down my feelings towards my dad and we would talk about him.

“Throughout my career my mum has stuck pictures into a scrapbook, things my dad would have wanted to see. Every time we get the scrapbook out, memories of dad come flooding back.

“I miss him every single day. Footie games for the school were hard – a lot of the lads would have their dads cheering them on. I remember thinking, ‘I wish Dad was here.’

“I was throwing myself around the pitch wishing that Dad could see how well I was doing.”

Although Paul never made a first-team appearance for Liverpool, he was given a rapturous reception by the Anfield faithful when he was named as a sub against Newcastle in 2004.

Paul recalls: “I was only on the bench but when my name was read out over the Tannoy system before the match there was a huge roar. It was such a special moment, I wasn’t even playing but the fans made me feel like I was on top of the world.”

It was at Anfield that Paul, who now plays for Welsh side The New Saints (TNS), struck up a close friendship with Steven Gerrard.

Liverpool skipper Gerrard lost his 10-year-old cousin Jon-Paul Gilhooley in the disaster and he wrote in his autobiography: “Hillsborough is on my mind every day of my life because I lost a member of my family there. Every year at the Hillsborough memorial service, I speak to Paul Harrison, who used to be Liverpool’s reserve keeper. Paul lost his dad at Hillsborough. Terrible. I can’t imagine being without my parents.”

Paul will be spending the 20th anniversary at the Anfield memorial service and says: “I know this one is a milestone but every year is the same for me.

“I always feel an incredible sense of loss. But the service is nice in a way because I get to pay my respects and catch up with some of the boys.

“I’ll usually have a chat with Steven Gerrard. He understands how important the service is.

“This year will be extra-special for me because my mum will be granted freedom of the city.

“It just goes to show what a great city Liverpool is. No one has forgotten the events of that day.”

[GYBS]

was a witness to the needless death of 96 football fans. The memory still sickens me

On the 20th anniversary of tragedy at Hillsborough, James Lawton explains why the police have a case to answer

Wednesday, 15 April 2009




The Hillsborough disaster memorial at Sheffield Wednesday on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the calamity which killed 96 Liverpool fans


It never goes away. The waste of it, the dereliction of duty, the callousness implicit in the cheap branding of innocent people who died so unnecessarily and the cover-up which started when Mrs Thatcher brought flowers the following morning – and bought the stories so carefully edited by the men who had failed so abjectly to protect 96 lives.

The deepest horror, 20 years on, is still the one that came, with sickening clarity even for someone untrained in policing or public safety, before a single life was lost.

You had only to stand outside the crush of the Leppings Lane end – as I did 20 minutes or so before the start of the game – to know that so many lives were in terrible danger and that, inevitably, some would be lost.


Maybe, worst of all, was the sense that nobody seemed to care. A group of policemen and women, without deployment, stood in a circle, talking among themselves.

It was surreal, a nightmare from which there could be no awakening. A mounted policeman tried to wheel, unsuccessfully, in space that was being filled more tightly with every second as more people were pressed down on the gate, and the flash of panic across his face was, you knew the moment you saw it, something you would never forget. It told you that in that hellish side of a football ground no one's safety could be guaranteed.

There was no control, no leadership, no apparent awareness of the odds rising so swiftly, so inexorably, against the possibility of averting a tragedy.

Now, after all the research and irrefutable evidence and documentation, the public knows, if they care to, the anatomy of this tragedy.

They know of the failures of the police, their deceits, their refusal to officially acknowledge any direct responsibility for what happened, and the lack of success in the private prosecution of the commander who was allowed to retire, without the disciplinary action recommended by the official Taylor report, on grounds of ill-health and on a full pension – shortly before taking a job as secretary of his local golf club.

But if such facts can still engender rage, if the refusal of home secretaries and police authorities to say, yes, there was a terrible negligence, and we need to say sorry to all those who lost loved ones, can only be seen as shockingly insensitive cruelties, there is also a more personal angst for anyone who happened to be there.

If you knew it was going to happen, how could you simply take the advice of the policewoman and walk to the other side of the ground, where the Nottingham Forest fans had not been herded into dangerously overcrowded places, then walk into the press box and sit next to a colleague and point to the Leppings Lane end and say, "People are going to die over there"?

No, you were as powerless as so many of the leaderless policemen and the dedicated ambulance drivers who, before it was too late, were denied access to the football pitch that had become a killing field.

But maybe you could have screamed to the heavens against this horror created by insufficient care and professionalism.

Instead, you tried to do your job as a reporter. You went down on to the field and saw the pathetic attempts to make stretchers of advertising hoardings. You said to yourself that you could indeed do what was urged upon you by one tear-stained man... "tell the world what really happened... everyone who has died here deserves that".

Down the years you tried to be faithful to that command. You drove to Liverpool to give evidence to the West Midlands Police who were conducting an "independent" inquiry.

You went into the witness box in Leeds Crown Court in the private prosecution but you felt useless then because all you could really say was that you knew it was going to happen, and if you knew why didn't the police know, and why didn't they react professionally.

Why were they so inert? Why were stories planted in The Sun that drunken fans robbed the dead and urinated on first-aid workers, stories that made you sick in the stomach if you had been out on the field and seen the desperate, untutored efforts to help the dead and the dying.

While the ambulances were held up by police because a "riot" was going on, those makeshift stretchers were made and there were beseeching attempts at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

In the absence of any form of official apology, which is the last scandal of Hillsborough, the steady seepage of truth is no doubt a small source of comfort to the bereaved.

The worst of the lies have been held up to the light and been ridiculed. But this does nothing to lessen the need for that apology.

Closure cannot come without it because it is one thing to know what happened, and see that it is plain to all dispassionate witnesses, and quite another to wait so long for such a concession from those who out of self-interest tried hardest to deny it.

In so many ways, those who have argued most passionately for the dead of Hillsborough have been vindicated. They have kept faith with the memory of their loved ones and they have exposed terrible injustice.

All that is left is the need for a breath of atonement. Twenty years is long enough to wait but then if you were there and powerless it is easy to understand why some will keep up their hopes until the day they die.

[Dundalk]

Thanks to supporters of other clubs coming on here and offering their sympathies

[Greavesie]

Thanks to supporters of other clubs coming on here and offering their sympathies

was going to post the same thing, I'm going to pay my respects now 

[tubby]

Has anyone got the Hillborough Stories? It was on Five Live the other day. I caught part 1 but not part 2. Usually those shows are available as podcasts after but im not sure what show it would fall under.

[stmichael]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00jsnyy/Hillsborough_Stories/

[Number 9]

Coming on LFC.tv now..I aint seen any tributes as was working!
Gonna watch this!

[jono]

Hillsborough doc is on sky anytime now

[burjennio]

History Channel 8 oclock