There are few places in the world that know how to channel adversity better than Liverpool.
And on Sunday afternoon and early evening, hundreds of thousands of people turned the city into a sea of red in a show of pride and support in salute to one of the Reds’ greatest ever seasons which ultimately saw only a mere two further additions to the Anfield trophy cabinet but provided a whole host of treasured memories during a 63-game marathon campaign in which they made every minute meaningful.
It had been a long time coming. The coronavirus pandemic meant the time-honoured communion between the football club which takes the city’s name and its supporters could not take place when the thirty-year wait for the holy grail of a 19th league title was achieved in the summer of 2020. Jurgen Klopp, having experienced with his team only the year before after the breakthrough Champions League triumph in Madrid just how special a homecoming tour could be, always promised it would happen one day and the hope always was it would be in conjunction with further silverware.
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That proved to be the case with the FA Cup and League Cup, both won so dramatically on penalties at Wembley earlier in the campaign, on display even if the biggest prizes which many fans had their hearts set on as the Reds relentlessly hunted down an unprecedented quadruple remained agonisingly just out of reach.
In truth, waking up on Sunday morning (for those that were able to get any sleep that is) many fans and indeed some of Liverpool’s players have admitted there was initially little appetite to put a brave face on and get in party mood such was the sense of devastation after Saturday night’s events in Paris. But the power of community had the restorative effect it so often does and acted as a balm to bruised hearts, restoring the soul and emotional connection Klopp has based his entire Anfield project on, skipper Jordan Henderson admitting despite never thinking it possible after the night before it had been one of the best days of his life and the manager himself declaring the club unequivocally to be the best in the world.
But as the dust settles, that devastation felt by many who endured one of the worst nights of their lives in the French capital remains and will take some time to heal. For some, it may never do. We’re obviously talking about much more than a football result here.
I was at the Stade de France on the Saturday, with a legitimate ticket for the match from Liverpool FC, and was remarkably lucky overall. I managed to get into the ground, eventually, and was able to watch the match (or try to at least, such was my shattered mental state) before - perhaps even more remarkably - being able to safely get out of the vicinity of the stadium after the game and back into Paris to get home in time for the parade.
But as a lifelong fan who has followed the Reds regularly around the country and across Europe for over thirty years, it was by a distance the worst experience of my football supporting life and has made me question where the game is going and whether I want to be part of it any more. And it is very clear from conversations with friends and social media feeds that many other time-served, long-standard supporters are feeling the same way right now.
There are two main reasons for this in my view. Even for those of us who escaped relatively unscathed, seeing so many friends and other Liverpudlians visibly shaken, frightened and upset has been unquestionably traumatic. And that has been compounded by the hideously predictable way the blame for the carnage has been shifted by those whose gross incompetence caused the living nightmare that was Saturday night in Saint-Denis onto those they were being paid to protect in a chilling echo of what happened in April 1989.
As an 11-year-old who hadn’t yet been to an away game, I wasn’t at Hillsborough but have grown up only too well aware how the 97 who were unlawfully killed that terrible day and the thousands who survived but were left traumatised were immediately the focus of a systematic cover-up to protect the inadequacies of those who failed them, damaging lies which have cost more lives since than we’ll ever truly know and are still clung to by those happy to live in ignorance and support state corruption.
So to see UEFA declare on the big screens on the stadium before the match had even belatedly kicked off that ‘late arrivals of fans’ were supposedly the cause of the delay - a false narrative straight out of the South Yorkshire and West Midlands police playbook - which they soon flipped to a different one alleging large numbers of counterfeit tickets once they realised there was ample evidence of problems outside the turnstiles up to four hours before kick off, was and remains soul-destroying. The suggestion late on Sunday evening in the official French police report that 40,000 ‘British’ supporters tried to gain unlawful entry only twists the knife further and shows the establishment as ever are circling their wagons and have no level they will not stoop to.
The only difference between now and 1989 is the first-hand accounts of those left to fend for themselves in a terrifying and life-threatening situation are backed up by mobile phone footage and also by scores of neutral journalists, officials, Liverpool players past and present and their families and even one of the club’s senior executives, Mike Gordon, who witnessed and were caught up in the chaos. People have often said the Hillsborough cover-up may never have been able to stand if the technology we have now was available then and it is vital the strongest possible response is produced from LFC, supporter bodies and the British government when the inevitable battle lines are drawn as investigations into what happened progress.
Those supporter bodies also have a crucial role to play in addressing one of the most dispiriting aspects following Saturday’s match, namely the ease with which some rival fans swallowed the UEFA and police lies and trotted out their usual ‘always the victims, it’s never your fault’ jibes and variations thereof. It should be noted there are many supporters, even from Liverpool’s fiercest rivals, who understand at any game of such magnitude there will be some fans without tickets as well as some with counterfeit ones and that is why there are well-established procedures in place such as ticket cordons surrounding the ground to protect everyone’s safety. These have in place for decades and, yet in 2022 and at a modern stadium built only 25 years ago for the World Cup in one of the world’s great capital cities, were conspicuous by their absence on Saturday and - along with the poor access to the stadium entry points - was one of the biggest factors in what followed.
Like many, my group of friends arrived on the fringe of the stadium after a wonderful afternoon in the fan park well over two hours before kick off but were held underneath the cramped underpass made even more dangerous by the mind-bogglingly stupid decision to park a load of police fans for well over an hour with no water, toilet facilities or most importantly information. When we finally able to shuffle on to the apron of the stadium - with still no-one having asked to see a ticket - it was clear from the fear-filled atmosphere and talk of various gates having already been closed that things were only about to get worse.
The friend I was sitting with, a Hillsborough survivor, and I approached our entry point at gate Y about half an hour before the scheduled 9pm local time kick off to a scene of utter mayhem with any kind of queueing or filtering system having completely broken down (if it had in fact been there in the first place). Neither of us were keen to thrust ourselves into the middle of it but were pulled in by a friend we saw and somehow managed to eventually navigate ourselves towards and eventually through the turnstiles but with a lot of discomfort. By this time, we were receiving messages from friends trying to going in the next gate Z - the one directly behind the goal - who told us it was shut (we later learned it had been closed, inexplicably, for hours) and they had been tear-gassed.
This was my fourth European Cup final and I can remember vividly the sense of anticipation and excitement I felt after getting into the ground in Istanbul, Kyiv and Madrid. This could not have been more different and I had never felt less like watching a football match in my life. We found our seats but seeing more fans including women and children joining us in tears and in a state of shock only compounded that sense of nausea. I remember saying we could win 10-0 tonight now and the shine would still have been taken off and I still feel that way. The result was and remains immaterial despite how emotionally engaged I’ve been with the incredible ride Klopp and co took us on this season.
But what has really shaken me to my core is what happened after the game, even though again I was incredibly lucky not to suffer the worst of it. We did not leave the ground immediately then took a while to locate a friend who was on their own and become separated in the carnage before the game from those he was due to be sitting with and ended up in a separate part of the ground. We somehow managed to walk back to the station without a problem but having heard how so many Liverpool fans were attacked and robbed by gangs of locals during this part of the night I’m not sure how. We were amazingly fortunate but, having heard accounts from friends including one who was hit on the head by a bottle and another who had to look after a pal in hospital, that sense of relief is massively offset with grief and anger at what our people had to go through.
And it is perhaps this aspect that the idiot fringe of football fans who think what happened to us on Saturday is a legitimate source of banter and petty point-scoring should bear in mind. As mentioned above and detailed elsewhere, there was a fundamental failure in organisation before the match which made access to an already poorly-appointed stadium much more difficult than it needed to be. But the hostility and outright aggression of the police before the match - videos of them tear-gassing in the face peaceful supporters clearly pleading for safe entry are now all over the internet - coupled with their disinterest in doing their job and protecting people from attacks from local gangs afterwards should send a shiver down the spine of any football fan planning to attend a football match abroad.
Initial jibes hurled our way that the Real Madrid fans all seemed to get in the ground okay have proven to be untrue, with it since being confirmed groups with French accents and football shirts also tried to force entry and scaled walls at the other end of the ground ahead of the match before subjecting Madrid fans to the same kind of attacks after the match Liverpool supporters suffered. So no matter what some people might want to believe, it wasn’t just ‘Scousers again’.
Ultimately football is a reflection of society and we are living in a world in 2022 when governments across Europe and beyond are seeking increasingly authoritarian police control while actively looking to limit and eradicate the right to peaceful protest. But we elect these governments and football - no matter how corporate it’s become - is the people’s game.
The initial noises from Liverpool FC, governing bodies and fan groups in this country and even the British government have given some small modicum of hope that the seriousness of what transpired in the French capital on Saturday has hit home and will be investigated properly so it never ever happens again. But it is difficult to have much faith in the powers-that-be to follow through given what we’ve seen globally in recent years and how vested interests always seek to protect their own position.
It is up to ordinary football fans of all clubs to unite, stick together and change the culture around how we are all perceived so that the trauma people suffered and the disaster which was narrowly averted in Paris is never repeated. Because next time it could be you.
