8/3/13 - On the 15th April 1989, I was at Hillsborough to witness the worst tradgedy in British Sporting History. 95 people and later that became 96 lost their lives & hundreds more were injured. Recently, the whole truth finally came out.  Everyone there that day knew of some of the lies; I don't think anybody realised however quite the extent of the cover up. I sincerely hope the families now get the justice they deserve.

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When I lost my mum to the vile disease of cancer on 1st May 1999, life was never quite the same again. After 15th April 1989, football would never be quite the same again. Eerily, the Titanic sunk on the 15th April: 77 years before Hillsborough in 1912. That changed much about how shipping companies dealt with their customers, why does it always take a tradgdedy before we do anything about it?

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Outside the cover up & on the subject of blame, I attach much blame to those who deemed it ok to pen & cage us in like animals; especially perimiter fencing. Whilst I have an axe to grind with Newcastle fans for their pitch invasion against us back in 1974, NOBODY ever died of a pitch invasion and 96 would not have died at Hillsborough that day had there been no perimiter fencing.

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The only unsurprising thing in all honesty was that it had taken this long for such a massive tradgedy to occur. For many years, I stood on terraces packed to the rafters. At times, in the old Trent End at Forest, once in you could not get out and rarely did you stand on the same bit of terracing for long when it was full & over full!   I have also stood on the Leppings Lane terrace when we were playing at Sheffield Wednesday & knew it to be a very low terrace with a particularly nasty perimiter fence.

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We were just the Forest fans at the other end of the stadium that day. It would be wholly inappropriate to do this website dedicated to Forest without my own feelings and reflections about that day, so this is my Hillsborough story.

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To get the full picture, you have to go back 12 months prior. The same 2 teams had met a year ago, the semi-final of the FACup, the same venue & packed crowd of 51,627 had witnesed a classic. Liverpool had beaten us 2-1 but a young Forest team had pushed them all the way. It was a bone of contention with the Liverpool fans that we had been allocated some 29,000 tickets and Liverpool 23,000. Clearly they were the bigger club and I can understand their annoyance.  But it was down to the routes into Sheffield from Nottinghamshire & Merseyside that the ground was split this way.  

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So, when we were drawn against them 12 months later, again Forest were allocated 29,000 & Liverpool 24,000 and a capacity 53,000 packed into Hillsborough anticipating another classic. We had the big terraced Kop End which held some 22,000 & the smaller seated stand which held some 7,000. Liverpool had 24,000 which included around 11,000  in the Leppings Lane terrace. In both years, Forest easily sold out their allocations, so I think that a few comments that suggest we should have been in the Leppings lane end are perhaps a little misguided. 

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By way of further build up, in the Quarter-Final on 18th March, we had beaten Man Utd 1-0 at Old Trafford, a wonderful result. A massive 12,000 travelling fans (our full allocation) sang "We're gonna win the lot" at the end of the game on the basis we had already reached the League Cup Final to be played on 9th April & the Simod Final, also to be held at Wembley on the 30th April.  Plus, we were handily placed in the league (although never likely to get anywhere near winning it).

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The relevance of the above paragraph really is to try & set the scene as we made our way to Sheffield on that lovely sunny warm April day. We had won the League Cup at Wembley 6 days earlier & we really believed we could beat Liverpool this time. The mometum was with us, as they say, and the mood was excellent  and very upbeat.

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By 2pm, we were in the Ground. Of the 5 of us that had gone in the car, myself and a mate were stood up on the Kop, the other 3 sat, very close to and adjacent to the Leppings Lane terrace.

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As kick off approached, the noise at our end of the ground was defeaning: ear drums vibrated & you could not hear yourself think. I remember at this point glancing down to the opposite end, it was absolutely packed in the middle 2 pens but either side you could see 5 or 6 rows of empty terracing. I remember momentarily thinking, 'for semi-final day this a bit strange', but then just getting carried away with the noise.

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Seemingly little had changed as the game got underway but then 6 minutes in, the referee stopped the game as Liverpool fans started pouring onto the pich; a few at first then more and more.

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Initially, there were some whistles at the Forest end. None of us had the remotist idea that anything was wrong but that would soon all change.  

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Timescales are somewhat blurred but after a relatively short period of time the pitch was full of mainly Liverpool fans. The Police, incredibly, at one point then lined up across the half way line to, in their 'sorry view' , keep apart the two sets of fans. The only few Forest fans on the pitch that day would be those with perhaps some medical skills trying to help the injured and dying.

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By now, there was 1 ambulance on the pitch... yes 1! The Liverpool fans were helping their own by lifting them up into the Leppings Lane seats above the terraces & also carrying them to elsewhere on the pitch on makeshift stretchers (the advertising hoardings).  

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And THEN it hit me. I watched somebody cover over somebody else, who was laying on a makshift stretcher, with what looked like a blanket.  And this happened only about 30 yards away from where we were standing.

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The previous wall of noise had changed and you could have heard a pin drop as the realisation began to dawn. Something had gone very seriously wrong. Incredibly, there had still been no announcement by this time over the P.A system so nobody really knew anything other than what they could see with their own eyes. It was mayhem. 

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I know to some younger fans, that must sound unbelievable but that was the way football fans were seen back in those days. In short, if you were a football fan, you were the scum of the earth, especially in Thatcher's Britain. They did not even consider us worth informing of anything that was going on. They (the authorities) could have delayed the kick off, but there was no way they were going to do that. The view being "Tough! You should have got here earlier"

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Incredibly, at this point the game had not even been called off! Eventually, there was an announcement and we were asked to leave the stadium quietly. Everyone obliged. Walking back to the car, people held radio's to their ears: 10 dead... 18 dead... 30 dead... 50 dead... and so on. 'Surely not', we thought?

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There were queues at phone boxes that looked a mile long; mobile phones had not been invented but people seemed happy to wait. They wanted to phone home to tell their loved ones they were okay.

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I don't really remember the journey home. I know nobody in the car uttered more than a couple of words. We just sat and listened to the radio as the death toll just kept increasing. The whole thing was just totally surreal.

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Back home in Nottinghamshire was bad enough. I can only imagine what it must have been like in Liverpool.

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You have to remember also back in those days, there was not much live football on TV. Family & friends back home only had local radio to rely on initially, although I know BBC's Grandstand did then cover the tragedy live as it unfolded in front of disbelieving millions. I know I was glad to see my family.

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