From a Field to Anfield: a Footballer's Journey from Grassroots to the Top Flight by Nick Tanner

Author:Nick Tanner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2017-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

13

15 April 1989

IHAVE mentioned how difficult I initially found life at Liverpool, but the struggles of my first season were put into perspective on 15 April 1989, when I travelled to Sheffield as a non-playing member of the squad for the FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough. I am not sure I can add anything that has not already been said, but having been there that awful day as a representative of Liverpool Football Club, I cannot write the story of my life and career without mentioning it.

We went down with the players’ wives on a separate coach to the team and we were sitting in the main stand on the south side of the stadium, with the Leppings Lane End to our left. We could see what was transpiring in as much as that it was clear something was wrong, but we didn’t actually know what, or the extent of what was happening. How could we have? The minute it dawned on me that something awful was unfolding was when I could see Bruce Grobbelaar trying to stop the game. It was around that point we were called into the players’ lounge and had to watch it play out on Grandstand, which was surreal because it underlined exactly how powerless we were to help, cocooned away in our safe little room.

No one really knew what was going on at that stage and the players’ wives were obviously panicking, because their husbands were out on the pitch. People ask me whether that day traumatised me, but I was a safe distance away. What it was like for Bruce, God knows, because he was right there seeing people being crushed into the fence. I didn’t have to see any of that, and I don’t know how it would have affected me if I had, but my main feeling about Hillsborough was first shock, then sadness that I could not do anything to help those 96 people, their families and the countless others affected by what happened.

There are so many things that could have happened before it got to the point that it did – you could see afterwards that they should have opened all the gates on to the pitch at the Leppings Lane End, only the people who had the ability to do that were being told not to by those in authority. After the shock and the sadness came the anger, not only at how it was allowed to happen but also at the way it was then covered up, with the lies and smears the deceased, their families, the club, the supporters and the people of Liverpool had to endure.

I can’t believe it took as long as it did for the truth of that day to be proved as emphatically as it was in the inquest verdicts of 2016. For the families to still have to be fighting their fight nearly three decades later is a national disgrace. Even today, I see people down here in

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