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New plans can return atmosphere to football
AFTER the Hillsborough disaster, many of us had to reshape our football memories of the years that had gone before. Things that had seemed like fun at matches took on a deathly hue and appalling conditions we had once accepted with the resignation and dark humour of the long-suffering, were recognised for the betrayal of the fan that they were.
Those of us of a certain age will share the same memories. Those of us who liked to stand at matches, anyway. I remember being bent double over a stanchion on the away t errace at t he Baseball Ground when Norman Whiteside scored the winner for Manchester United in the FA Cup fifth round in 1983, not because it knocked the breath out of me but because the celebrations were so joyous.
I remember being carried along by the crowd, my feet not touching the floor, when we were leaving a game at Filbert Street. That was not particularly unusual. I don’t even remember what match it was. In the climate in which we existed then, it was barely worthy of note.
These things seemed like fun because, in that age of innocence, we always assumed the implicit sense of danger they carried with them was only temporary.
When we were getting the breath knocked out of us at English league grounds up and down the country, we always assumed the pressure would relent and the surge of the crowd would pass and we would be able to breathe again. Hillsborough changed all that.
Hillsborough meant that we could never look back on those days and nights of surging humanity and uncontrolled crowds in the same way. They do not seem like fun in hindsight. They seem like times when we did not know quite how close to tragedy we all were.
They seem like warnings that went unheeded. They seem like symptoms of a time when clubs treated supporters with undisguised contempt, when the terraces were like cattle sheds and fans were herded like beasts into pens. After Hillsborough, the scales fell from our eyes.
WE saw we could never go back. Hillsborough was just too horrific ever to contemplate a return to the terraces. There was too much pain, too much agony, too much injustice, too great a readiness to blame supporters for everything.
So even though my best times as a football supporter have been spent on terraces, I never felt able to mourn their loss.
They demanded too high a price. It was hard to even think about arguing for the return of standing areas i n any form i n our t op divisions when bereaved Liverpool fans were so passionately opposed to the idea.
But now that stance has shifted slightly and, even though the club and the Hillsborough Family Support Group still oppose so-called safe standing, the Spirit of Shankly fans’ group has begun a consultation process on the idea. It has also begun to attract support among Premier League clubs.
After the league wrote to its 20 member clubs to gauge interest in trialling safe-standing schemes, it is thought a majority will indicate they are in favour.
There is a recognition that this is absolutely not about a return to the terraces as we once knew them. This is not about a return to surges and cattle pens. This is something different.
It is still a hugely emotive subject but it is also right to acknowledge that, for everything we gained when we turned our football arenas into all-seater stadiums, there was much that was lost, too. We lost the communality and the camaraderie that standing areas brought. We lost their physicality and their togetherness and their equality. Everyone on a terrace paid the same for their space. And we lost the atmosphere that standing areas brought.
Our stadiums turned into libraries compared to the great cathedrals of noise they had been before. Sure, there were still exceptions to that rule, particularly at Anfield or Old Trafford for a night match but, too much of the time, stadiums lost their passion.
That was also because the loss of standing accelerated the advance of t he corporatisation of our football grounds. Clubs charged more for seats t han t hey did for standing, prices went up, the demographic changed, the traditional fan was pushed out and the prawn sandwich brigade took over.
That t rend has been getting worse. Now it has got to the stage where we accept it as the norm. We have almost forgotten how much louder it used to be at our stadiums in the days before disaster struck in 1989.
None of this is an argument for going back to the way things were. That will never happen. No one wants it to. But it is an argument for a middle way, a way that can help English football recapture some of what it l ost without compromising the safety so dearly won and so desperately fought for.
That middle way is safe standing, which has been widely used in German football and elsewhere and has had an initial successful trial at Celtic. Rail- seats, the form of safe- standing used at Borussia Dortmund’s Signal Iduna Park and many other Bundesliga grounds, make surges and crushes impossible but allow fans to stand.
It is hard to argue, surely, that rail seats are not more safe than the current system. Thousands of supporters stand at matches in our all-seater stadiums anyway, causing safety issues, rows with stewards and conflict with supporters who wish to stay seated.
Safe standing is not a step backwards. It is not a betrayal of those who lost their loved ones at Hillsborough. It is a step forwards. It is a responsible way to reclaim some of what we have lost without endangering what we have gained.