On the 15th of April, 1989, ninety-seven football fans, ninety-seven supporter, ninety-seven children and parents and brothers and sisters and cousins and co-workers and friends went to a football match and never came home.
The years pass, and with time perhaps the immediacy of tragedy fades a little, at least for some. New fans find their way to the club and the players come and go and the optimism and heat of every new summer pre-season ticks into the chill of winter and another year working its
way towards an ending.
Yet for so many, the memories will always remain, buried by time and necessity perhaps but never far below the surface. Memories of friends and family, of the people they once knew who only ever wanted to sing and cheer and celebrate together at a football match and then, in an instant, were gone.
For many, the hardest part will have been in the years and decades since, in the long fight for justice in some ways remains frustratingly far from being won though there have been successes, steps towards it hard earned by people who never should have had to fight for truth and justice for those they lost. At least now most in the wider football world do have a better understanding of the truth.
Thirty-seven years on, though, Hillsborough remains a defining scar in the history of Liverpool Football Club.
And so we once again mark the date in memory of it, and just as importantly we do so in memory and honour of those who have fought tirelessly over the years for the truth and for some measure of justice for those whose lives were lost through no fault of their own in 1989’s stadium crush at the Leppings Lane end of an FA Cup semi-final against Nottingham Forest.
In the aftermath of the match at Sheffield’s Hillsborough, the dead were blamed for the tragedy. By the police, by the media, by Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government. Those in power were more interested in avoiding blame—and placing it on those who could not now defend themselves—than in doing right by the people they were meant, as police and politicians, to serve. There remains, sadly, something universal in that.
It took until April of 2016, after nearly three decades of fight and advocacy, before an independent inquiry fully cleared the victims. Those who failed and then blamed them still remain largely unpunished, will never be forced to fully grapple with their crimes, some criminal and some moral, and the fact that on the most basic human level they are contemptible failures deserving far less than what life has given them.
So once again, after 37 years, we remember. Both the disaster itself as well the response by authorities. Both the friends and family members who were lost and those who were waiting for them to come home and then spent their lives fighting for their memories. Justice for the 97. Today and always.
