Barmy Army: The Changing Face of Football Violence by Dougie Brimson

Author:Dougie Brimson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Category C Publishing
Published: 2011-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The events in Sheffield on that fateful day, 15 April 1989, have received massive exposure over the years and quite rightly so. Much has been made of the police actions, while a lot less has been made of the simple truth that if Liverpool supporters without tickets had not been trying to force their way in-as they and others had done a thousand times before-those 96 souls would still be alive today. But the stark reality is that those people died as a direct result of the threat of hooliganism. Arguments about which end the Liverpool fans should have been in and why a cordon wasn’t in place at the end of Leppings Lane are largely irrelevant. If people had not caused trouble in the past, there would have been no need for fences and we would not have arrived at the point where all football fans were demonised. So rather than believe that the crowd were fighting in those pens or trying to invade the pitch, the police would have immediately realised that they were being crushed to death. We are all to blame in part for what happened at Hillsborough because, as fans, we either played our part in dragging the game down to that point or we simply sat back and watched while others did it.

The subsequent Taylor Report finally forced the game to get its act together and sort itself out. The fences came down and all-seater stadia became compulsory in the top flight. Furthermore, the ID card scheme, which the government was still advocating, was finally abandoned. Most important, however, was the sudden realisation among the general public and the police that football fans were not all hooligans; most were actually human. As a result, attitudes changed and, finally, the police began to take a more sympathetic approach in their role at football.

The following season was one of the quietest for many a year and the country began to believe that, finally, things had changed. But all that work was undone in a few short hours when on the final day of the season, Leeds travelled to Bournemouth needing a win to secure both promotion and the Second Division title. The police, anticipating disorder at this game as soon as the fixture list had been announced the year before, had been calling for months for the game to be moved from the Bank Holiday weekend to earlier in the season. But the Football League had ignored their pleas and insisted the game go ahead as scheduled. As a result, over 5,000 Leeds fans travelled and down on the seafront many of them ran amok; 104 arrests were made over the weekend and at one point, police in riot gear had to quell a major off on the beach. The Football League were shamed into handing the police a veto for all future games which might produce problems.

A few weeks later, England travelled to the Italia ‘90 World Cup, where more problems broke out among the fans.

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