May 29 – The Heysel Disaster | On This Football Day

May 29 – The Heysel Disaster

HERE at OTFD we normally like to bring you a quirky, hopefully fairly interesting story each day from the world of football, but it would be wholly remiss of us not to mark the events of this day in 1985 when 39 football fans died in the Heysel disaster.

Italian giants Juventus met Liverpool in the final of the European Cup. At the time Liverpool were kings of Europe, holders of the cup and four-time winners in a seven year period.

Juve had never won it, but had been losing finalists twice before.

That the disaster is named after the stadium it occurred in is tragically apt; for the stadium itself was in large part to blame for the events that unfolded that night. Dilapidated and crumbling, Belgium’s national ground was nowhere near adequate to host such a big game, but Uefa had selected it anyway.

They blundered again when they ordered that a section of the ground be give designated for neutral fans, which simply meant Italian and English supporters ended up mixing in the supposedly neutral zone.

About an hour before kick-off trouble began to flare between the two sets of supporters as missiles were thrown, and a charge from the Liverpool fans forced their Juve counterparts to retreat. As they did so many fans were crushed against a retaining wall which soon collapsed. It was at this point that thirty-nine Italian supporters were killed, and a further 600 injured.

Then many more Juve fans began rioting in retaliation. The Belgian police were hopelessly inexperienced at dealing with such trouble and a fierce and long-running battle ensued between them and the Juve fans.

Amidst all this, the players were in the dressing rooms, waiting to play out what was supposed to be the most important match in the club football season.

Captains of both teams, Gaetano Scirea and Phil Neal appeared to ask the fans to calm down so the game could begin. Despite the reservations of many, the authorities then ordered that the game be played, fearful there would be more violent recriminations if it were not.

Accounts differ as to how much the players knew when they stepped over the white line, but it is likely none of them knew the enormity of what had happened. Jim Beglin told the Independent in 2005: “We started to hear that there was serious violence as we were putting the finishing touches to our preparations in the changing-room. I was eventually told there might be three deaths, but not until just before we finally went out. I knew something bad was going on but had no idea of the scale. We were being told to stay focused. It’s possible the management and my more experienced colleagues shielded me from things.

“On a recent TV documentary we’ve all said we thought the final shouldn’t have gone ahead, but I can understand why Uefa and the police said we should play. Worse trouble could have ensued.”

The game itself, not that it mattered, saw Michel Platini score a debatable penalty to win it 1-0. Never has a result mattered so little. Beglin said: “The enormity of Heysel hit me like a train after the game. Dejection over losing the European Cup final to Juventus quickly gave way to disbelief when I learned that 39 people had died. I walked with my Liverpool team-mates to where the wall had crumbled and the Italian fans were crushed. The remnants of people’s lives – handbags and shoes, scarves and spectacles – were strewn among the rubble.

“Win, lose or draw, we usually had a party after a big game. But the atmosphere at our base in Brussels was very sombre. We swapped stories and several of the wives and girlfriends were distressed because they had actually seen the bodies being piled up under the stand. Paul Walsh’s partner, Melissa Berry, had been manhandled by an agitated Italian. The players all felt numb. We just wanted to get home.”

In the aftermath of the tragedy, the fingers of blame were pointed squarely at the Liverpool fans. Within days English clubs had been banned from European competition – all clubs for five years, Liverpool for six. “We have to get the game cleaned up from this hooliganism at home and then perhaps we shall be able to go overseas again” Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said.

Yet the veteran football journalist Brian Glanville felt blaming the English club was all too easy, and disagreed with the ban. He wrote in 2005: “This never seemed fair to me. Not fair to English football, not even fair to Liverpool as a tarnished city. A week earlier, in Rotterdam, on the occasion of the European Cup Winners’ Cup final, I saw Everton’s supporters behave themselves almost impeccably. The one misdemeanour I noticed was when an Everton fan walked out of a cafe without paying the bill.”

Glanville contends Uefa had just as much culpability in the disaster as the rioting fans: “That Heysel was ever chosen for the game was a shocking commentary on the folly of Uefa and the idleness of its team that was meant to inspect the stadium. The word was that the day they came, it was very cold, and that they scarcely bothered to emerge from the warmth to see what should have been obvious to them — that this stadium was not fit to stage a game of such magnitude.”