The players first became aware of the problem at 2.54 when Bruce Grobbelaar took some practice shots off John Barnes at the Leppings Lane End. Going to retrieve a ball, Bruce saw the huge number of fans shoehorned into the central pens. ‘Get the bloody gate open,’ Bruce shouted at the police.
Liverpool fans screamed at the police to open the gates, to save them, but the police on the spot needed permission. Looking at the situation from their perspective, I partly understood their unwillingness to respond. If one constable opened a gate of his own volition, and people lost their lives in the fight to squeeze through the entrance, he’d be culpable. Again, the constables lacked direction from their superior officers, and particularly Duckenfield. If no guidance was forthcoming from the top, what on earth could the police on the ground do?
I felt sympathy for the policemen down on the Leppings Lane, who must have seen terrible sights, witnessed people having the life squeezed out of them, but couldn’t act. In all the inquiries so far into Hillsborough, nobody has explained the level of communication between Duckenfield and his police down at the front.
And so, with people dying yards away, the game kicked off on time. When the first whistle goes at matches, there’s usually a real buzz, a sudden burst of noise, but at 3 p.m. on 15 April 1989, the atmosphere was so different. The mood was noticeably subdued, shorn of the usual excitement, and even when Peter Beardsley hit the Forest bar at the Kop end at 3.04, the roar lacked intensity. A fan ran on the pitch, pleading with everybody to stop the game, and thank God he did because he probably forced the authorities to act quicker. Again Bruce shouted at the police to ‘get the bloody gate open’. The scale of the disaster was now becoming apparent. Bruce recalled fans pleading, ‘They’re killing us, Bruce, they’re killing us.’ Just writing those words chills me. At 3.06, a policeman finally strode on to the pitch to tell Lewis to stop the game.
‘Come on,’ Lewis shouted to the players, ‘everybody off.’ When we’d gathered in the dressing room, Lewis popped his head around the door. ‘Keep warm. The police have informed us that it’s likely to be five minutes, ten at the outside,’ said Lewis. ‘I’ll keep you informed. You’ll have the opportunity of doing a warm-up before restarting.’
Any chance of the game being played disappeared in my eyes when I briefly went back on the pitch, stepping 10 yards over the touchline and witnessing what seemed a scene from a war-zone. Although I never realised then the extent of the loss of life, the full gravity of the situation began hitting home. Liverpool fans were ripping up advertising boards to form makeshift stretchers, tending to the injured and dying. When these fans climbed over the fences, some police feared they were about to attack the Forest end, even forming a line across the pitch. Forest fans cottoned on faster than the police what was really happening. At the beginning a few shouted ‘hooligans’, but when they realised it wasn’t that, they quickly became supportive, clapping them for the work they were doing. Those Liverpool supporters had only one thought in their minds and that was to save their mates and relatives who’d been crushed on the Leppings Lane. They were the heroes of Hillsborough.
Responding quicker than the emergency services, Liverpool fans rushed to save lives in a stadium where the medical provision was woefully inadequate. I couldn’t believe that only one ambulance was there to deal with the emergency when the game was stopped at 3.06, when the police knew from 2 p.m. they had a potential disaster on their hands. The mismanagement at Hillsborough was a public scandal. Why did they not bring in more medical people and equipment, or at the very least put them on stand-by? Every second wasted meant Liverpool fans caught up in the crush edged closer towards asphyxiation. Only one oxygen cylinder was available, so when one policeman, Superintendent Peter Wells, stepped up to the fence, and began giving oxygen to those fighting for air up against the wire, what happened to those fans lying on the grass? Wells did what was right, trying to keep alive those pressed at the fence, but more lives might have been saved if Hillsborough had had more than one oxygen cylinder. I stress over and over again that Hillsborough was a disaster waiting to happen.
I’d gone on to the pitch looking for Paul, who’d attended the game with Roy Evans’s son, Stephen, and Alan Brown, a friend of ours who was involved with the Liverpool European Supporters’ Club. The three of them had developed a ritual with the Cup, beginning with the third-round trip to Carlisle United. They’d made a day of it, stopping for lunch on the way. When Liverpool won 4–0, they made up their minds to go to every game in the Cup. As soon as I began to realise the extent of the problems at the Leppings Lane End, I became frantic with worry. Paul, Stephen and Alan had to go through the Leppings Lane to reach their places. If they’d arrived late, they could have got caught up in it.
Suddenly seeing Paul walking across the pitch with Stephen and Alan, my heart leapt. Thank you, God. I never said anything to Paul, just greeting him with a huge hug that communicated my feelings. I was lucky, and Paul was lucky, because all around us, people were dying. Thank God the three of them passed through the Leppings Lane before 2 p.m., before those central pens began trapping fans. They wanted to be there early for the singing, and that meant they escaped the carnage. I think Paul knows how fortunate he was. I’ve still never talked with Paul about Hillsborough. I just can’t. The emotion is too raw. I just can’t imagine how I’d have coped if my son had died, so I try to block out the awful thought. Like Paul, Stephen knows he was lucky. So does Alan. Just imagine how Alan would have felt if he’d taken the sons of two friends to a game and never brought them home? Fortunately, they survived. Leading Paul back to the main stand, I pointed him up to the directors’ box where Marina was waiting with Kelly. I caught Marina’s eye and we realised how blessed we’d been. We could have lost our wonderful son.
When I returned to the dressing room, the police asked Brian Clough and me to make an appeal for calm. They led us through the bowels of the main stand, through the kitchens, where a radio was on and scores were being announced, a weird reminder that life was going on outside the hell of Hillsborough. On reaching the police control box, we discovered the mike wasn’t working.
‘Hold on, we’ll try to get it fixed,’ said a policeman.
Cloughie shrugged. ‘I’m off,’ he said and left. Giving up on the mike, the police guided me to the DJ’s studio, housed in a Portakabin adjacent to the Leppings Lane, from where I made my announcement.
‘Could you calm down, please, there’s been some problems,’ I said. ‘We really respect the fact you’re trying to be calm. Let’s remain calm and do the best we can for the people who are injured.’ As I walked away, I saw two guys clapping me. Just as I reached the dressing room, some fans came up the tunnel, screaming abuse at the police. ‘It’s a disgrace,’ I heard one of them say. Stepping through the dressing-room door, the place was utterly silent. Sensing the nightmare outside, the players had hardly moved. They were just sitting there, slumped on the benches. A couple of minutes later, Lewis entered the room.
‘The game’s off,’ he said, and the players began showering and changing. Even then, with the game cancelled and having seen some of the scenes outside, I didn’t realise the enormity of what had happened until we went upstairs and started watching the television. ‘There’s been a tragedy at Hillsborough,’ Des Lynam reported. ‘There are many dead.’ I was anticipating the worst, perhaps four or five fatalities, but when Des mentioned that it was feared 75 had perished already, I couldn’t take it in. Seventy-five? There was no conversation, nothing. Nobody could say anything. Forest’s players were also in the lounge and my heart went out to them. Cloughie’s men were the forgotten party in all this, witnessing those emotive events.
I met PBR and another director, Tony Ensor, the club’s lawyer, who’d been up to check on the gates at the top of the Leppings Lane. They’d heard that the FA chief executive, Graham Kelly, had been told by Duckenfield there’d been a forced entry by Liverpool fans, an allegation that PBR and Tony swiftly realised to be false. Downstairs, the gym was being used as a medical station and, when that failed, as a morgue. Adding to my anger over Hillsborough was the realisation that the doctors did not have the necessary equipment or medicine. Once again, the lack of management of this disaster was shocking. The emergency services should have arrived quicker, bringing in more supplies of intravenous diamorphine and drips, a point raised in the Taylor Report. The moment they knew people were being crushed, the ambulances should have loaded up at the local hospitals with all the items required for dealing with asphyxiation.
At 5.30, we climbed wearily into the coach for the journey back to Liverpool, probably passing distressed parents speeding towards Sheffield. Throughout my years at Liverpool, the bus was a place of noise and happiness, filled with banter as we headed to training or returned from a successful expedition with a trophy on the dashboard. Not now. Silence and misery were our companions. Collapsing into my seat, I asked the driver to keep the radio off. Nothing should disturb the quietness, no music, no scores, no meaningless chatter. After what we’d just experienced, everything else seemed irrelevant. No one talked. No one wanted to. Every player was lost in thought, searching for answers. I just sat there numb, holding Marina’s hand, thinking of my family and wondering whether I knew any of those fans now lying in that morgue at Hillsborough, or in the emergency ward of a Sheffield hospital. From the television reports, everybody on the Liverpool coach knew about the horrendous number of deaths but we wanted names. As a club with deep roots in the community, with a strong bond between team and terrace, everybody feared having lost a friend.
Briefly, I thought back to 1971, to the Ibrox disaster, when 66 Rangers supporters died in a crush on stairway 13. The game was against Celtic and, as a Celtic player, I was there, but only as a spectator, and fortunately down the other end. Ibrox had different causes. The overcrowding on the stairway occurred when departing fans heard the roar for a late goal and turned back up only to be swept away by those racing out. Unlike Hillsborough, Ibrox had nothing to do with bad policing.
Back at home, I couldn’t watch
Match of the Day
, couldn’t bear to see the scenes again. After hugging my children, I went to bed but sleep didn’t come easily. The state of despair continued in the morning, and I was stirred into action only by the phone ringing at around 10 a.m. It was PBR, ever the club’s servant, ever the man thinking of others.
‘Kenny, there’s a lot of people come up to the ground so I’ve decided to open the gates, let them come in, give them somewhere to be,’ said Peter, adding details about plans for a service at St Andrews Cathedral that night. Shortly before 6 p.m., I entered the cathedral, clutching Marina’s hand tightly, walking past grieving people sitting in the pews, their lives ripped apart by the indecision of a few police officers on the other side of the Pennines. My respect for Bruce Grobbelaar, already immense, grew even more as he bravely read from the Bible, his voice quivering with emotion, trying to provide some comfort for those in mourning. I knew Bruce was badly affected by what had happened, having been so close to the Leppings Lane End and heard the fans’ cries for help. I also knew he would be steadfast when Liverpool Football Club needed him most, giving succour and strength to a distraught community. I knew, too, that I had to stand up and lead, take a more public role and speak to the Press, something I was uncomfortable with. I acted spontaneously, honestly and straightforwardly, dropping my guard and talking as a parent, not as a manager under scrutiny for his tactics. The reason I responded was because the people of Liverpool were, and always will be, part of my family.
My desire to help hardened when I heard that Graham Kelly, having been asked about the immediate future of the Cup, stated that he felt the FA would be loathe to ‘abandon the competition’. I had some sympathy for Graham, who was responding to journalists’ questions at Lancaster Gate, but the FA should have been more sensitive. For the FA to make a judgement call at a time when Liverpool fans were lying in morgues and hospital beds, the death total rising grimly, was disgraceful at worst, tactless at best. The FA needed to be more mindful of the families’ feelings, and also aware that some people pointed the finger of blame at Lancaster Gate. It required a disaster on the terraces for the FA to start taking advice on grounds. They chose that ground, they paid the police to control that tie, so I felt they needed to answer questions on both decisions, rather than pontificate on the future of the FA Cup. The FA’s self-declared role as custodians of the game rang hollow at that time.
Leaving London to its selfish stance, Merseyside rallied round the stricken. On the Monday morning, Marina telephoned all the wives, discussing how they could help. I contacted the players, saying a few words about how we needed to respond towards the relatives. ‘They’ve always supported us and now we must support them,’ I said. ‘That’s what families do and this club is a family.’
The players knew anyway. My words just echoed their thoughts. They were good boys, very approachable people who understood the club and its place in the heart of the community. Adversity casts light on a man’s true character and I noted with quiet pride that Liverpool’s players demonstrated dignity and compassion in abundance during that difficult time. That team will always have a special bond because of what they went through then.
On the Monday, they couldn’t wait to get up to Anfield to help. PBR flung open all the doors, letting everyone come in to lay floral tributes on the Kop while the Salvation Army band softly played ‘Abide With Me’. I’d already left a tribute from the Dalglish family. Early that morning, Paul and Kelly gave me their teddy bears, which I tied to the goalposts. The sea of flowers and scarves on the Kop grew and grew as more and more people visited. The relatives were ushered into the Candy lounge where Marina and the girls set up a tea-urn on the bar at the back. May and the cleaning ladies were busy helping out. It was in the aftermath of Hillsborough that it became even more apparent to me exactly how strong the relationships were inside the club. The closeness of the staff, from cleaning ladies to players, was really important. It’s different now, sadly, with the staff split between Melwood and Anfield, and I fear Liverpool has lost some of its identity.