RIP the 96

[dave.woodhall]

Why dont we get memorial services for the Bradford fire victims though?

It's a good point.This is a horrible thing to say but true.
Liverpool were the worlds biggest club at the time.
I would think more people thought the Valley hosted Rugby League than football.

There's an annual memorial service for the Bradford victims.

[bertlambshank]

Why dont we get memorial services for the Bradford fire victims though?

It's a good point.This is a horrible thing to say but true.
Liverpool were the worlds biggest club at the time.
I would think more people thought the Valley hosted Rugby League than football.

There's an annual memorial service for the Bradford victims.

It get nowhere near as much coverage though.

[AV82EC]

Why dont we get memorial services for the Bradford fire victims though?

It's a good point.This is a horrible thing to say but true.
Liverpool were the worlds biggest club at the time.
I would think more people thought the Valley hosted Rugby League than football.

There's an annual memorial service for the Bradford victims.

It get nowhere near as much coverage though.

It might not get as much coverage but its not about coverage, its about those families being able to pay their respects to their loved ones.

[dave.woodhall]

There are two main reasons why Hillsborough is better remembered than Bradford - the Valley Parade disaster is over in a way Hillsborough will never be until justice is done, and everyone who attended a game in that period knows it could have been any of us. Again, you don't get that feeling about Bradford. 

[nick harper]

I have read a number of books on Hillsborough and one of the key factors was that Duckenfield was in charge of a large scale football match for the first time. He also did not use the previous year's experience as a guide where there was much better crowd control and filtering of supporters prior to reaching the Leppings Lane turnstiles.

Once the crush outside was becoming dangerous in the minutes up to kick-off, the police at the turnstiles  asked for permission for the gates to be opened. Even then, once Duckenfield made that decision (which he subsequently lied about), the tragedy could have been avoided if he had put a line of policeman in front of the tunnel leading to the central pen.

As it was, several hundred fans walked straight down the tunnel to a pen that was already seriously overcrowded and where people were already in serious distress prior to kick-off.

As others have said, the police decisions on that day reflected an overriding objective of crowd control rather than crowd safety and that entrenched approach largely contributed to the disaster.

[NeilH]

The passing of the years have never dampened my shock over that day, my disgust over the behaviour of the police, subsequent press reaction and the realisation that it could so easily have been any of us who went home and away with Villa in the 1980’s.  I still can recall like yesterday my shock as the BBC cut to the live pictures from Hillsborough and the true scale of what was happening was suddenly beamed into my parents living on a gloriously sunny day.
A school friend of mine was a Forest fan and was of course there. It deeply, deeply affected him and he was wracked with guilt over the fact that at first the Forest fans merely suspected another crowd riot until the Liverpool fans started making makeshift gurneys to ferry the injured and dying form Leppings Lane.

The bottom line is that 96 football fans like me and you, went out on a sunny day to watch their football team play and never came back. Had we as football fans been treated like human beings instead of being branded as troublemakers and scum by Thatcher and her government, I doubt this would have occurred.

[London Villan]

The reason for fans being treated like scum wasn't some sort of class agenda against football fans, but the fact for the best part of 20 years English football had a large minority of idiots who had spent many a Saturday afternoon wrecking pubs, trains, coaches and each other, let alone the European cities and cross channel ferries that were regularly destroyed too.

This culminated in the death of a fan at St Andrews, in the largest riot ever seen at a English football ground where 250+ police were taken to hospital and Heysel a week or so later where 39 Juventus fans were killed.

While this doesn't in anyway excuse the actions (or lack of them) of the police at Hillsborough it goes some way to explain why they were slow to react to an entirely different problem that was occurring in front of them.

[Somniloquism]

There are two main reasons why Hillsborough is better remembered than Bradford - the Valley Parade disaster is over in a way Hillsborough will never be until justice is done, and everyone who attended a game in that period knows it could have been any of us. Again, you don't get that feeling about Bradford.

Although Bradford could have happened to us due to the wooden structures at a lot of grounds at the time. I only know of Wolves having to close a stand but I'm sure a lot of others probably did as well after the disaster.

[dave.woodhall]

There are two main reasons why Hillsborough is better remembered than Bradford - the Valley Parade disaster is over in a way Hillsborough will never be until justice is done, and everyone who attended a game in that period knows it could have been any of us. Again, you don't get that feeling about Bradford.

Although Bradford could have happened to us due to the wooden structures at a lot of grounds at the time. I only know of Wolves having to close a stand but I'm sure a lot of others probably did as well after the disaster.

I don't think anyone could hark back to an incident they'd personally experienced where they'd felt in imminent danger of being burned alive. Many of us had been involved in a crush on terraces. 

[Somniloquism]

There are two main reasons why Hillsborough is better remembered than Bradford - the Valley Parade disaster is over in a way Hillsborough will never be until justice is done, and everyone who attended a game in that period knows it could have been any of us. Again, you don't get that feeling about Bradford.

Although Bradford could have happened to us due to the wooden structures at a lot of grounds at the time. I only know of Wolves having to close a stand but I'm sure a lot of others probably did as well after the disaster.

I don't think anyone could hark back to an incident they'd personally experienced where they'd felt in imminent danger of being burned alive. Many of us had been involved in a crush on terraces.

No but it could have happened at any time back in the day and Bradford was the unlucky team it did happen too. The difference is you were intimately aware of feeling overcrowded but not aware if the person behind you had dropped a cigarette through the floorboards of the stand which just missed a pile of rubbish. (which is pretty much the point you were making anyway at the start, I was just adding that it could have happened at any of the wooden stands).

As a slight aside, did Villa do anything special with the old Trinity to allow it to stay open as that was a Wooden base wasn't it?

[dave.woodhall]

But none of us had never been in a fire, or had any idea how one could start. We'd all been in crushed and we all knew what caused them.

All the burnable materials in Trinity Rd were heavily fireproofed. I still wouldn't have fancied testing it though.

[Dave Cooper please]

The point is, it was obvious what caused Bradford, and lessons were easily learned, the only controversy was the locked fire exits at the back of the stand.
No one wanted to admit responsibility for Hillsborough, easier to blame the scum that followed football.

[peter w]

I think what resonates more than anything is exactly what has been said, those of us who were supporters at the time - actively following the club home and away - have been in crushes rather than fires, which is what makes this all to real for so many. West ham away and even at Hillsborough a few months before the semi-final.

As much as anyone who saw the pictures of what happened it feels like a stand alone tragedy as it wasn't a tragedy waiting to happen, unlike Hillsborough. there were plenty of preambles to the semi-final which you couldn't say for bradford. in that situation its death or nothing.

[Chico Hamilton III]

I was re-reading Simon Inglis's first "Football Grounds of..." a few weeks ago ( a masterpiece, by the way, written in 1983) and he actually comments on the amount of combustable rubbish piled up under the wooden seats at Valley Parade.

[Risso]

Saw the photos of the Liverpool supporters with their faces being pushed up against the bars of the fences again yesterday, truly heartbreaking.  Some families lost more than one member, all because they were unlucky enough to get into the ground first.