How we won FA Cup – a week after wit
▶ Even now, 32 years on from the disaster, it stirs powerful emotions in Leasowe Pacific players who saw it unfold
The final whistle blows at Old Trafford and, for just a little while, Merseyside-based team Leasowe Pacific beam with pride and elation. Against the odds they have beaten Friends of Fulham, the favourites, to lift the 1989 Women’s FA Cup. But it will not be long before their smiles are replaced by immense sorrow.
Seven days earlier, three of the Leasowe squad had been in the Leppings Lane end at Hillsborough, witnessing football’s darkest day. Amid almost incomprehensible, citywide grief, shell-shocked Leasowe – who would become Everton Ladies in 1995 – had to decide whether to play the final. “That was a very emotional discussion,” striker Maria Harper tells The Daily Telegraph. “Eventually we decided to do it for the people of Merseyside, having given the girls who had been at Hillsborough the final say.” Thirty-two years later, recalling the events at Hillsborough, the emotion remains strong.
It was around 2.30pm on April 15 in 1989 that close friends and ardent Liverpool fans Jill Salisbury and Dianne Coughlin arrived together at the Leppings Lane end of the ground for the men’s FA Cup semifinal against Nottingham Forest. Team-mate Cathy Gore was already in the stands, seated in the upper tier above them. Doncaster Belles player Michelle Jackson, their manager Billy Jackson’s daughter, was nearby on the terraces, too.
None of them could have predicted the horrific events that were about to unfold, as 96 Liverpool fans died. Salisbury and Coughlin made their way into the ill-fated central pens of the lower tier but, at the last moment, they turned back and made a decision that may well have saved their lives.
“I thank my lucky stars that I’d been there the year before and knew [of somewhere to stand instead], so we just came straight back out of that middle pen. Where we went, on the left, it was much quieter, so we didn’t know exactly what was going on until much later,” Coughlin says.
Minutes later, hundreds were crushed by extreme overcrowding. “There was nobody monitoring how many people were going in each pen,” Salisbury says. “When the match kicked off, we could see people spilling out of the terraces and the police came to try to help. Then, in front of us, we saw someone lying on the ground, and somebody threw a coat over his head.
“Something was really wrong. I said to Dianne, ‘Can he be dead?’ Then more and more people started spilling out. You could see people being pulled up into the top tier.”
Sitting in the front row of that top tier was midfielder Gore, whose parents were also at the game, positioned separately in one of the stands opposite. “We were right above it as it unravelled,” she says. “We didn’t realise the number of deaths until later on. The people of Sheffield opened their doors and let us use their phones, so we could let people know we were OK. It hit home when we got to the coach and it left Sheffield half full. So many people were missing.”
Salisbury, whose cousin had joined her and Coughlin, says: “We left the ground bewildered, wondering what had happened. My cousin was listening to his radio and the numbers [of deaths] kept going up. I remember we queued for an hour to use a public phone, one of those big red telephone boxes, to let people know we were OK. When it got to our turn, we only had a minute or two, because everybody else was waiting.”
Back in Merseyside, the rest of their team-mates, including Harper, waited anxiously. “It was horrifying to watch it and I’m thinking, ‘Where are they?’. It was awful,” Harper says. “They rang home late at night, the message got passed around and that was such a relief, but God help the people who didn’t get that call.”
Leasowe’s league game the following day against St Helens was called off. The women’s FA Cup final was the following Saturday. Friends