This Sunday, at 5.30 p.m., during the Chelsea-Liverpool clash, supporters will be allowed to stand to encourage their team. A first since the Hillsborough drama in 1989.
“Today is a day that will go down in the annals of the Premier League”, writing The Independent while the first division of the English championship is preparing to reconnect with the standing stands. “It will be legal for fans of the Chelsea-Liverpool game to stand in a top-level game, a first since the 1990s.”
And more precisely since the “Hillsborough disaster” in which 97 people had lost their lives as a result of a crowd movement. This April 15, 1989, in this stadium in Sheffield in the north-west of England, Nottingham Forest received Liverpool. And it is among the supporters of this team that the greatest number of victims was deplored. Standing stands were then banned in all English and Welsh stadiums, before the ban only applied to the two first divisions.
Police negligence
In 1991, justice concluded that the accident had been caused by some of the Liverpool supporters themselves by forcing into an already full stand. But, for many, the responsibility lay with the police and their negligence. “The origin of these unbearable deaths of men, women and children is not to be found on the side of the standing stands”, writes Brian Reade in the left-wing tabloid The Mirror.
It is the disdainful treatment of supporters, the lack of consideration of their
[…]
F. G.
