Heysel Stadium Disaster

At 3.06pm on April 15th each year, thousands of Liverpool fans all over the world take a moment or two out from their everyday lives to stop and remember the 96 supporters who died at the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989.

It's the saddest day of the year for many Liverpool supporters. However, it's not the only day when many fans stop for a moment to think of a large group of football supporters who went to a match only never to return.

If April 15th is the saddest day in the club's history, May 29th is surely the lowest. On May 29 1985, 39 football fans died when a wall collapsed at the Heysel stadium in Belgium. What should have been one of the greatest nights in the club's history turned into a nightmare.

Instead of leaving Brussels having seen our team lift a fifth European Cup, Liverpool supporters travelled back to England having witnessed the deaths of 38 Italians and one Belgian.

Liverpool had objected to the choice of ground to stage the final well before the friendly banter outside the stadium began to turn nasty inside. Aside from the fact that the stadium appeared to be crumbling, Liverpool's main concern was that there was to be a neutral section of the ground set aside for football fans from Belgium. The club argued that only Liverpool and Juventus should be allocated tickets. Setting aside a neutral area would only lead to both sets of fans being able to buy tickets off Belgium touts thus creating a dangerous mixed area. As history has since proved, this neutral area was soon filled with Italian supporters.

As tempers became frayed inside the ground about an hour before kick off, both sets of fans baited each other through a segregating fence made from chicken wire. After a sustained period of missiles being thrown by both sets of supporters, some Liverpool fans charged at their Italian counterparts and, as chaos took over, Juventus fans fled only for a wall blocking their escape to collapse on top of them. Thirty-nine football supporters died where they fell.

Later that night, Juventus won the European Cup 1-nil. It's a match nobody wants to remember.

Kenny Dalglish, Liverpool's greatest ever player, will never forget what happened in Belgium though.

"The fact that fatalities might result wouldn't have occurred to the Liverpool fans when they ran across."

Dalglish admits that it wasn't until the following morning that the Liverpool players finally realised exactly what had happened inside the stadium.

"We saw the Italian fans crying, and they were banging on the side of our bus when we left the hotel," he recalls. "When we left Brussels, the Italians were angry, understandably so; 39 of their friends had died. I remember well one Italian man, who had his face right up against the window where I was sitting. He was crying and screaming. You feel for anybody who loses someone in those circumstances. You go along to watch a game. You don't go along expecting that sort of ending, do you? Football's not that important. No game of football is worth that. Everything else pales into insignificance."

Almost 20 years after that terrible day, Liverpool and Juventus were drawn together again for the first time in the quarterfinals of the Champions League. It was if fate had brought the two teams together to join forces and honour those who had lost their lives at Heysel.

"There is a friendship between the two clubs and supporters," Liverpool Chief Executive Rick Parry revealed after the draw had been announced. "As soon as the draw paired us together for the first time in 20 years, memories of the Heysel Stadium disaster were naturally in people's minds, both in Turin and here on Merseyside. The two clubs built bridges and forged powerful links after Heysel. The bond between us remains strong, but we still want all Juventus fans to know that we are very sorry about the fact that 39 people lost their lives. We moved forward in a spirit of friendship after Heysel and the clubs continue to work together in a spirit of mutual respect."

May 29th remains a day of remembrance for both Juventus and Liverpool supporters.

In Memoria e Amicizia, in Memory and Friendship

Rocco Acerra
Bruno Balli
Alfons Bos
Giancarlo Bruschera
Andrea Casula
Giovanni Casula
Nino Cerullo
Willy Chielens
Giuseppina Conti
Dirk Daenecky
Dionisio Fabbro
Jacques Fran?ois
Eugenio Gagliano
Francesco Galli
Giancarlo Gonnelli
Alberto Guarini
Giovacchino Landini
Roberto Lorentini
Barbara Lusci
Franco Martelli
Loris Messore
Gianni Mastrolaco
Sergio Bastino Mazzino
Luciano Rocco Papaluca
Luigi Pidone
Bento Pistolato
Patrick Radcliffe
Domenico Ragazzi
Antonio Ragnanese
Claude Robert
Mario Ronchi
Domenico Russo
Tarcisio Salvi
Gianfranco Sarto
Giuseppe Spalaore
Mario Spanu
Tarcisio Venturin
Jean Michel Walla
Claudio Zavaroni

Rest in Peace

http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/lfc_story/heysel/

I remember the day well, for all the wrong reasons, Very dad day indeed.

RIP to all who lost their lives that day, and my prayers are offered for those they left behind.

RIP: Justice for the 39... Belgian police and alcohol to blame

My respects and condolences to all who died that evening and to thier families.

When I'm reminded of that evening the first thing that jumps into My head is "thats the first time We wore addidas",Maybe thats My way of pushing the darkness of the event out of My mind.

But lets not forget that although LFC supplied UEFA and The Belgian authorities with a dossier outlining the best way to "police" Our supporters and to lessen the chance of trouble,A section of the stadium was allocated to other supporters in Our end and was woefully segregated.

I firmly believe UEFA wanted an excuse to get rid of "the English disease"(yeah,You and Me)and they set us up and we all know how disasterously wrong it went.True Our lads reacted and We must feel shame for that,but UEFA were responsible for making the possibility of violence avilable and should feel the shame more than Us,but they wont will they,Well not publicly anyway.


Here are a couple of piccies I took that night.

R.I.P

I watched this a few weeks ago.


Touching stories.

http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/news/latest-news/25-years-on-impact-of-heysel

25 years on: Impact of Heysel

Football scholar Dr Rogan Taylor assesses the impact of Heysel 25 years on - and explains how the disaster helped lead to the creation of the Premier League.


It's tremendously important. Liverpool fans should never forget Heysel - 39 dead people. The Hillsborough disaster four years later has sometimes overshadowed the fact that on a foreign field something just as terrible for those 39 families happened.

What were the implications of Heysel?

The lessons that were learned from Heysel were not lessons about our own stadia and policing, because it was in Belgium. It took Hillsborough to learn those lessons. Heysel was the egg that hatched into the Premier League - a lot of people don't realise that. After Heysel there was no European football. Liverpool had 20 consecutive years in Europe from 1965. So where was the revenue going to come from? The big five at the time - Everton, Manchester United, Tottenham, Arsenal and Liverpool - got together and started talking about what they were going to do. That's how the breakaway came about. Heysel plus Hillsborough over Sky TV equals the Premier League and modern football.

That's quite a legacy...

Yes, it is. The tragedy at Heysel started the second big football revolution - the first was the beginning of professional football, which happened 100 years before Heysel and Hillsborough in 1887.

You played a massive role in picking up the pieces after Heysel by setting up the Football Supporters' Association. Tell us about that...

I was doing a PHD at the time and I was tremendously affected by Heysel and the impact it had on this city. Liverpool was devastated. It came at a very bad time for the city. Those who remember the 1980s and Mrs Thatcher's government will remember we had no more flesh on the bone. Football was the one field of excellence in which this city still flew a flag, and we'd just been punched right in the midriff.

I took in all the coverage afterwards - the newspapers and magazines and the television. As I read and watched, I felt more and more as if I should write something myself because nobody had addressed what Heysel actually meant. People were very keen on where fault lied, why young men wanted to fight each other and why we were in that stadium. But nobody had stood back and addressed the meaning. My feeling was that the disaster signalled a complete collapse in the relationship between football fans and the game. So I decided to write a piece and send it to a newspaper.

I went round to my friend Pete Garrett's house with a few other Liverpool fans. One of those, Maggie Reid, suggested we set up an organisation - a kind of supporters' union - and attach its name to the piece I sent to the newspaper. We called ourselves the Football Supporters' Association.

And what was the response?

We sent the letter on Monday, it was in the paper on Thursday and by Thursday lunchtime BBC Newsnight had rung. They said the whole of the following day's show would be dedicated to the question 'Where does English football go from here?' following Heysel and the ban on English clubs from Europe. They had no fans and asked us to come. They had no one to call - there was a huge space waiting to be occupied by average fans.

And it went on to become a major organisation...

We got three or four thousand letters back in the first two or three weeks. Over the last 25 years it's achieved a tremendous amount. There had been no national fans' organisation that individual fans could join. We filled a gap and the media was keen to engage with us. We were drawn into a highly significant and political situation.

What impact did Heysel have on hooliganism in this country?

It's hard to tell. The Football Supporters' Association was never formed as an anti-hooliganism organisation. Our argument was that hooliganism was an aspect of a failed relationship. We wanted to start sorting this relationship and we knew the hooliganism would begin to sort itself - though there are always a few idiots around.