Liverpool fans and the Sun

[nwgull]

Did the Sun actually say that the 96 were responsible for their own deaths? I thought they put the blame on the fans who arrived late, and then made up stuff about fans actions when people were trying to treat and help victims. The way some people talk about it, you'd think that the Sun actually caused the disaster.

The Sun did make a full apology about 7-8 years ago. Hard to tell whether it was sincere or just an attempt to increase circulation on Merseyside.

 

[Gritt23]

Yes, they were at it again yesterday, holding up anti Sun posters at Wembley. Haven't we all had a gut full of this now?
Hillsborough was a disaster..the Sun's coverage did leave something to be desired and the police did make mistakes. But ffs won't they ever move on?
You don't hear Juve fans raising the subject of Heysel every five minutes, when nearly 40 Italians were crushed to death by the actions of rampaging, out of control Liverpool fans.
Why don't some of the thousands of boozed-up ticketless Liverpool fans who turned up late at Hillsborough that day and started a riot outside to force the police to open the gates, come forward and share some of the blame?
Fat chance!
I'm just bored with it now. Like all genuine football fans we will never forget Hillsborough. We just don't want it rammed down our throats every five minutes.

Nope, disagree entirely. They say that we get the media we deserve, in which case, this embarrassing excuse for a newspaper is a sad reflection on the state of this country, and I wish we didn't have it. As for your attack on Liverpool fans, you're just wrong mate.

"the Sun's coverage did leavesomething to be desired" has to go down as an early, yet very strong candidates for "understatement of the year, 2012."

It would also appear that despite all the intervening years the paper doesn't have any greater understanding for the families of victims, whether they are the Hillsborough or the family of Milly Downer. Disgusting rag.

 

[readingstockport]

Yes, they were at it again yesterday, holding up anti Sun posters at Wembley. Haven't we all had a gut full of this now?
Hillsborough was a disaster..the Sun's coverage did leave something to be desired and the police did make mistakes. But ffs won't they ever move on?
You don't hear Juve fans raising the subject of Heysel every five minutes, when nearly 40 Italians were crushed to death by the actions of rampaging, out of control Liverpool fans.
Why don't some of the thousands of boozed-up ticketless Liverpool fans who turned up late at Hillsborough that day and started a riot outside to force the police to open the gates, come forward and share some of the blame?
Fat chance!
I'm just bored with it now. Like all genuine football fans we will never forget Hillsborough. We just don't want it rammed down our throats every five minutes.

So can I start shopping in focus diy again? I stopped when the goldstone ground was shamefully stolen from BHA and sold for a diy store. An no BHA fans died because of that did they?

(and yes I know they have closed)

 

[HawkTheSeagull]

They arent happy with The Sun and seeing as the Final yesterday was on the TV in a load of countries yesterday and watched by millions of people, its a clear way to get the message across and good for them for doing it. You can never forget things like Hillsborough and who cares if it is "rammed down your throat every 5 minutes".

That said, i dont really buy any news paper (unless i have a long train journey), all i usually read is lies, lies and oooh, theres something true there but slightly exaggerated.

 

[Brian Fantana]

Did the Sun actually say that the 96 were responsible for their own deaths? I thought they put the blame on the fans who arrived late, and then made up stuff about fans actions when people were trying to treat and help victims. The way some people talk about it, you'd think that the Sun actually caused the disaster.

The Sun did make a full apology about 7-8 years ago. Hard to tell whether it was sincere or just an attempt to increase circulation on Merseyside.

This.

 

[matthew]

Do agree we hear so much about this and Hillsborough but if i was to mention the Moscow disaster which was much worse i bet no-one would know what i mean

 

[Dan Gleeballs]

Agree with Stumpy Tim. Its possible I may have just stated previously on this forum my distaste for Liverpool FC. Every season they piss me off a little more but... They deserve a sincere apology from the Sun

 

[Hamilton]

Do agree we hear so much about this and Hillsborough but if i was to mention the Moscow disaster which was much worse i bet no-one would know what i mean

But this thread isn't about the relative comparisons of different events. It's about the poorly thought through comments of the original OP.

No doubt Mo will soon come on here and tell us this was all a fishing expedition. I hope that doesn't happen as it clearly wasn't.

Instead, I hope Mo admits that the original OP was a poor a piece of writing. Not as poor as that which appeared in the Sun's offensive article, but nevertheless totally misjudged.

Ps educate us about Moscow as I admit my ignorance and would like to know.

 

[Storer 68]

Do agree we hear so much about this and Hillsborough but if i was to mention the Moscow disaster which was much worse i bet no-one would know what i mean

that's because it is an EXCELLENT cover up by the Russian authorities at the time...............

This huge, 104,000-seat arena, which was to host the 1980 Olympic Games, was also home to Moscow's favourite football team, Spartak. And thereby hangs a tragic tale that few fans outside Russia know about.

On the evening of 20 October 1982 Spartak were playing Dutch club Haarlem for a place in the last 16 of the Uefa Cup. They would win the match on the way to a 5-1 aggregate victory, but it was also the night on which the greatest disaster in the history of Russian football took place. Officially, 66 fans lost their lives, crushed to death, but several subsequent investigations and eyewitnesses put the death toll closer to 350. That makes it the worst disaster in the history of world football, worse even than the 318 people who were killed in rioting at Peru's National Stadium in Lima in 1964 and the tragedies that have scarred football in England at Bradford and Hillsborough.

The Russian winter set in early in 1982, making the stone steps of the East Sector of the Lenin Stadium extremely icy. Since no more than 15,000 Spartak fans and a hundred or so hardy Dutch spectators had come to the match, the stadium authorities crammed them into a single section of the ground, leaving terraces of the remaining three-quarters of the stadium empty and pristinely snowy-white. It was to prove a fateful decision.

I was visiting my students in Moscow and went along to cheer on the team I had played for (twice) and had supported for 20 years. I sat with journalists, just as I had two years previously as British Olympic attaché at the Moscow Games. The contrast between the hot, humid August of 1980 and the freezing October of 1982 could not have been greater. I shivered to the end, only warmed by Edgar Gess putting our 'Reds' 1-0 in the lead.

Just before the final whistle, several hundred fans had sensibly decided to leave and take an early underground train home from the Lenin Hills station. But Spartak scored a second goal in injury time, through Sergei Shvetsov. 'I wish I hadn't scored,' he would say later.

Many of the departing fans descending the icy steps of the gangway and hurrying inside the dark tunnel did what many others would have done. Hearing the roar that greeted the second goal, they rushed back to join in the celebrations. As they did so, they ran into a wall of Spartak fans on their way out.

Some witnesses say the militia would not let the returning spectators back into the stadium, so they were stuck in the tunnel, unable to move back or forward. Panic ensued. Because the stadium authorities had closed other tunnel exits, hundreds were caught on icy steps, stumbling and slipping in the darkness. It was horrific - they were trampled to death.

Away from the darkened terraces, few could see what was going on. The foreigners were quickly ushered away from the stadium through swiftly opened side exits. Yes, I heard muffled screams, saw panic-stricken Spartak fans slipping and sliding and falling on the gangways; and saw and heard fleets of ambulances converging on the Eastern Sector of the ground. But nobody seemed to know what was happening or how serious the situation was. Rumours abounded, but then they always did in Moscow.

One 16-year-old who lived to tell the tale was future tennis star Andrei Chesnokov. He provides an eyewitness account of the disaster: 'On the slippery steps people were falling over, knocking others to the ground like dominoes. To save myself I vaulted over a barrier, stepping through row upon row of bodies. Some put out their hands, crying, "Help me! Save me!" But they were stuck under piles of corpses.

'I managed to pull out a young lad and carry him to an ambulance medic. But he was dead. I saw at least a hundred bodies laid out in rows on the running track at the bottom of the gangway.'

Another young boy, Alexander Prosvetov, now correspondent of Sport-Express, was there to support Spartak. He recalls: 'In the darkness, on the icy steps, the crash barriers buckled as militiamen stood by, not knowing what to do, watching as scores of fans were being trampled and crushed to death. I was lucky, being a long way from the gangway. But I knew something terrible had happened.'

The next day Moscow's evening paper Vechernaya Moskva contained a short cryptic note following its match report: 'An incident occurred yesterday in Luzhniki. After the football match, some spectators were injured.' No more. Not that day, not the next, nor the next week, next month, next year.

Under an ailing President Leonid Brezhnev - he was to die 21 days later - the communist leadership dithered and could not bring itself to admit to bad news. So, like the victims, the news was smothered.

According to the testimony of some of the victims' relatives, the bodies were removed as quickly as possible and the families given no more than 40 minutes to pay their last respects before the dead were buried in a mass funeral. Some relatives claimed that the police had warned them not to speak of the tragedy - especially to foreigners - on pain of imprisonment.

No more Spartak matches were scheduled for late October to stop families laying flowers or otherwise marking their loss. Four months later, on 8 February 1983, a trial took place to apportion blame or, rather, to find a scapegoat. The unfortunate accused was the stadium chief, Panchikhin, who had only been in the job just two-and-a-half months. He was given 18 months corrective labour. Despite testimony of eyewitnesses about fatal mistakes made by the militia, no investigation was made of their activities. The trial was not reported in the press for several years.

Not until 1989 did the truth - or smatterings of the truth - come out. Not all the pieces were easy to fit together. This was towards the end of Mikhail Gorbachev's period of glasnost. Already the regime had made a fatal mistake in trying to conceal from the public, and the world, the nuclear reactor explosion at Chernobyl on 24 April 1986. By 1989, communism was crumbling in eastern and central Europe, and the Baltic states were struggling for their independence from the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev was rapidly losing control and unable to stop all Soviet dirty linen from being washed in public, even if he had wanted to. That was the background to the first public revelations, seven years late, about the 1982 stadium disaster.

By a sad irony, this was the year when nearly a hundred Liverpool fans were crushed to death in the Leppings Lane end of Hillsborough before an FA Cup semi-final. Football fans around the world extended their sympathy to the victims' families and Liverpool Football Club. The Spartak victims, who also died supporting the club they loved, were denied those international condolences because of their government's phobia about 'bad news'.

In 1992, when communism had fallen in the Soviet Union and it had splintered into 15 independent nations, Spartak fans clubbed together to pay for a modest monument that was erected outside the tunnel in which so many had died. Football fans visiting Moscow, on learning of the story, often left red carnations at the foot of the obelisk. It certainly attracts far more floral tributes than the giant statue to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, which welcomes spectators to the once-Lenin, now Olympic, Stadium.

The former Russia captain and current Fulham player Alexei Smertin recalls that when his then team Bordeaux played Spartak the day before the 17th anniversary of the tragedy, both Bordeaux and Spartak fans together laid a carpet of flowers around the memorial in memory of the dead.

Finally, last year, on the 25th anniversary of the disaster - known today simply as '20 October' - a memorial match was played in the Olympic Stadium between former players of Spartak Moscow and of HFC Haarlem. The game was a prelude to the vital league tie between Spartak and FC Moscow. Haarlem handed over £3,500 to the victims' families, who were also given a percentage of gate receipts from both games.

The Haarlem captain of the 1982 match, Martin Haar, confessed to some guilt among Dutch footballers and fans that, unlike many Spartak followers, they had known nothing of what had happened after the match. He was not alone. The Spartak player Edgar Gess said: 'We knew nothing about the victims. We were sitting in the dressing room afterwards and hadn't the faintest idea about the catastrophe unfolding around us. We later heard that the Voice of America radio station had broken the news that evening. But it was only next morning when Spartak boss Nikolai Starostin told us the news that we were aware of the disaster.'

If you are going to Moscow for the Champions League final, spare a thought for the past as you look round the Olympic Stadium. And if you have a rouble to spend, buy a bunch of red flowers to lay at the monument to fans who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Jim Riordan, Emeritus Professor of Russian, lived in Moscow for five years and was the only westerner to play for Spartak Moscow in Soviet times. He is now a columnist for The News, Portsmouth, and a season-ticket holder at Fratton Park.

 

[HawkTheSeagull]

Do agree we hear so much about this and Hillsborough but if i was to mention the Moscow disaster which was much worse i bet no-one would know what i mean

Thats because Hillsborough was a lot closer to home, would probably be the same for the Moscow disaster in Russia.

 

[Hamilton]

Moscow story...

m.guardian.co.uk

 

[HawkTheSeagull]

I never knew or heard of the Moscow disaster before, but thats incredibly shocking to read

 

[matthew]

There was a really good documentary on ESPN about the Moscow Disaster a cupple of years back, i'll try and look it up

 

[RedSteve65]

Apart from the lies the S*n published they have never apologised.

 

[Hamilton]

Two cover ups then!

 

[Gazwag]

To the opening poster - Do you still sing Build a Bonfire, do you shop at the Goldstone Retail Park, would you spit on Bellotti, do you still hate Archer with a passion.

If you say yes to any of the above surely you can see why Liverpool supporters hate the sun for the disgusting lies it printed the day after Hillsborough.

 

[Skaville]

Murdoch's empire is on the ropes. Hardly time to crawl back under a stone is it?

 

[Mr Burns]

I hate Liverpool with avengenace, but before many of you go any further, this is definately worth a read Hillsborough disaster - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As wanky as their supporters and club are, and no doubt there were a few pricks wearing their colours on the day that didn't help (we've all got em) actually reading what happened, and how and why it happened, will change a lot of peoples opinions.

For me, in my opinion the simplist why of looking at it, was the police in charge panicked, and whether through incompentance or arrogence, completely f***ed it up, not just outside the ground, but events leading up to the disaster.

Seriosuly, before anyone passes negative comments, read done to the end of section 3 Hillsborough disaster - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[mona]

The Sun could well be setting for good as more and more details come out about its dodgy activities. Good riddance to Murdoch's influence on British life.

As for scousers, there is an element of self pity in their make up but theirs is a lively and interesting city. Football trips there are usually good. Anyway many football fans around England perceive Brighton fans as self-pitying - so beware living in glass houses.

 

[Fef]

To the opening poster - Do you still sing Build a Bonfire, do you shop at the Goldstone Retail Park, would you spit on Bellotti, do you still hate Archer with a passion.

If you say yes to any of the above surely you can see why Liverpool supporters hate the sun for the disgusting lies it printed the day after Hillsborough.

Summed up in two sentences.