Supporting Celtic at the time of Hillsborough

I feel a bit of a fraud writing this. I have no connection to Liverpool or the events of that day in Sheffield. The only connection I have is that I was a football supporter attending matches at the time and as a spectator experiencing what would be alien to today’s generation of football fan.

The resulting Taylor Report was to have a profound effect on the history of Celtic Football Club after the Scottish Football League made it compulsory that all top level football grounds should be all seated by August 1994. For Celtic this was a massive financial obstacle which the old regime had failed to plan and budget for and would be their eventual undoing. Fergus McCann set about building a stadium that would comply with this mandate and had the vision to build a 60,000 seater stadium at a time when our average attendance was less than 30,000. We decanted to Hampden and returned in August 1995 when the north stand was completed, eventually the phases of the new Celtic Park were completed in 1998.

From this date on the Celtic Supporters have enjoyed the comfort, welfare, atmosphere and safety of an all seated stadium. Thankfully the generation of Celtic supporters over 20 years old will never have experienced the way in which football fans were once treated and looked upon by the establishment and authorities. The average attendance of less than 30,000 was partly due to the poor performances on the pitch but was also largely due to the conditions and environment of the old ground and away grounds along with the stigma placed on being a football fan in those days. It wasn’t really a place for a family day out.     

Celtic, like Liverpool at the time was predominantly made up of a working class support, blue collar workers with a left wing upbringing. At the time of the mid to late 90’s Britain was in the grip of a class war engineered by Thatcher and her government and football fans were seen very much as second class citizens with the potential to cause trouble and violence at every match.  David Mellor serving as a junior minister of the home office at the time prior to his toe sucking days was quoted on Radio Five live today as saying that “its true that Mrs Thatcher was no great lover of football” of course she wasn’t; it was a sport played and watched by the working classes. It is a completely different sport and a different demographic that attends matches now and I am relieved that my son will be watching football in this environment when he starts attending the matches every week.

On the day of the Hillsborough disaster Celtic Park was being used for a Scottish cup semi final between Rangers and St Johnstone. Celtic were playing the following day in the other semi-final in a match at Hampden against Hobs and a minute silence was observed; I wonder if these days the match would have been played at all as a mark of respect. My mum was in hospital at the time and I visited her on the morning of the match; she pleaded with me not to go but I told her it was different up here it was much safer – I was 15 I knew it all. Besides was I just never to attend football again? I suppose she was putting herself in the shoes of mothers from Liverpool who had waved their sons off that fateful morning. The reality is looking back it could have happened at any of the grounds I visited in those days given the same set of avoidable decisions made that day.

I always thought exiting the grounds was the more dangerous as fans bunched on the terracings towards the exit at the end of the game then headed for inadequately sized exit gates down dangerously steep stairs and I remember one incident leaving Fir Park where my feet never touched the ground until I was out in the street. Terracings were overcrowded and hazardous; when you were in the Jungle and a goal was scored you would sometimes take a tumble in the surge down and you knew you had 5 seconds to get back up before the surge returned but you never felt in danger, the jungle was closed usually about 2.15pm every match day.

On away days whether you travelled on one of the football specials or not the Police would try and herd you together straight to the ground and threaten arrest if you attempted to go your own way. There was a real divide between the authorities and the football fan and those of us who were there will have witnessed guys getting lifted for little more than wearing a football scarf. I have been recounted by my uncle of the chaos of the time in 1985 when the police horses charged down janefield street unprovoked causing a stampede and panic amongst fleeing fans.

 The police force at Hillsborough that day were the very same force who had gone toe to toe with the miners four years earlier and had operated on a mandate from the Government to use whatever force necessary. The feeling of class warfare amongst the authorities would have lingered on from those days for miners substitute football fans and the practice of doctoring statements would have been prevalent from those dark days of the strikes.     

We all pretty much knew what we thought was the truth from the Taylor Report and then Jimmy McGoverns excellent drama Hillsborough but the real exposed truth is hard to take in. The systematic dissemination of a smear campaign blaming drunk ticketless fans that commenced as people lay unidentified in the make shift mortuary seems just too unbelievable. You have to remember there were no mobile phones; internet; fans forums; twitter and people got their news from papers and television without questioning the validity of a story or slant put on it. Eye witnesses from that day had no outlet to tell their story, no way of communicating what actually happened to wider audiences because the smear campaign had already begun, the story was out in the mainstream and people were more likely to believe a police source and newspaper than some low life football fan.

As a Celtic fan I have witnessed incidents abroad first hand in Ajax and in Vigo that were 100% the fault of the police and yet have picked up a paper on my return to Glasgow Airport to find a report from someone who wasn’t there condemning Celtic fans. It’s a tear drop in the ocean compared to what happened at Hillsborough but was for me an insight into how easily it was to smear a group of people and get it into the mainstream without checking the facts. It also made me extremely angry and frustrated.    

On 30^th April 1989; 15 days after the tragedy Celtic hosted a benefit match to raise funds for the families affected and it was to be the first match Liverpool had played since that day giving them the chance to take to the football field away from anfield. The ground was full to capacity that day as 60,000 people took their places at 2.30pm to pay tribute in a minutes silence before the kick off. I have to say it wasn’t just fans of Liverpool and Celtic who attended, I saw Hibs, hearts and Rangers fans there as well, comfortable to wear their team colours in an atmosphere that was welcoming and somber. There was no segregation and Liverpool fans who had made it home safely from the Leppings Lane stood amongst the Celtic fans and together sang one of the most emotionally charged renditions of “You’ll never Walk Alone”. In the Celtic end Liverpool fans unfurled a banner that was split green and blue and read “Thank you Glasgow”; ballboys walked around the perimeter of the terracings with buckets and people threw coins in; a Liverpool banner was carried around the track which was being weighed down by the coins being thrown into it.

Celtic supporters at the game knew they were no different from the Liverpool fans and there was a sense of “there but the grace of god” amongst us; we came from similar working class backgrounds where football was the escape and there was an affinity with the City from its similar history of immigration. Fans swapped scarfs, T-shirts and Strips and the surrounding pubs were full of football fans coming together and welcoming people back to the game they loved at a time when the hurt was so raw.

Liverpool were immense that day and King Kenny made a cameo appearance and typically scored as well; Celtic had played a tough game at pittodrie twenty four hours earlier and from recollection it was the weekend Rangers clinched the title but the score and the performance were irrelevant. In some small way I hope Celtic and Glasgow had helped towards the feeling of letting Liverpool and its fans know that they weren’t alone and I as a Celtic fan will always be proud of this day in my clubs history.

God Bless the 96 YNWA.