A (I hope) final word from me on yesterdays debate

because I think its time we all moved on an looked forward to what is a massive game this weekend!

I said yesterday i would read the report and come back and let certain posters who were critical of my (what i thought were pretty balanced) comments know if it has changed my mind. The answer is yes it has changed my mind a bit.

It hasn't changed my mind on the point that seemed to cause so much offence to certain posters yesterday, namely that is it too simplistic to say that the whole disaster was caused by or the fault of one person or body. i still believe that it was a tragic combination of factors and circumstances that came together on that day. No one person or body caused the Hillsborough disaster, there were a large number of causes and factors, some obviously more significant than others. I don;t really want to get into the ticketless fans argument because I don;t think it really gets us anywhere and to be honest in the context of what I regard as the key revelations of the report yesterday, whether or not you believe that was one of the factors that came together is in my view largely irrelevant. People can believe what they want to believe on that front and form their own opinions.

What, I think the report yesterday has highlighted, however was that the public authorities were clearly more culpable than most of us realised in terms of how they prepared for and reacted to events on that day and subsequently attempted to cover up their own inadequacies. Some individual mistakes on the day were perhaps excusable faced with what was a chaotic situation. We've probably all been in football crowds where things have got pretty close to being out of control and in those situations individual policemen can have a tough job. However other mistakes and cock-ups which occured both prior to the day and in responding on the day also demonstrate pretty graphically how the manner in which football fans were treated by the police and others in authority in those days contributed massively to the tragedy. In particular, the notion that some of those fans could have been saved but weren't due to the mistakes of the authorities (or perhaps even more worryingly due to the fact that they were "football fans" and therefore the police regarded them as trouble makers) is something that should be disturbing to every football fan regardless of which team you support. I do now understand why those families have continued to seek answers in relation to that 3.15 cut off point and i hope they get them.

As football fans who follow their team i suspect we have all at one time and another been on the wrong end of heavy handed or disdainful policing or treated like sh*t just because we are watching football. Its not like it used to be and things are definitely a lot better but it still happens and I was on the receiving end of one such experience just last season. Hopefully one of the legacies of this report will also be a further change in that attitude moving forwards.

Posted By: Jim on September 13th 2012 at 09:40:42

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