One of the defining characteristics of a major tragedy is the ease with which it appropriates the history of a place.

Whatever else may have happened there - at Lockerbie, Columbine or Seyne-les-Alpes - the name of the location becomes instantly synonymous with catastrophe. Nowhere in the history of European football, with the exception of Hillsborough, has this tendency been more dramatically demonstrated than at Heysel. Thirty years on, those two syllables still evoke a list of phenomena no civilian should expect to confront in any arena: things such as chronic incompetence of organisation, dumb tribalism, hatred, terror and death.

The phrase "like Hiroshima" may sound excessive in this context - 39 people died at Heysel and more than 500 were injured - but you don't have to spend long talking to people who were in Brussels on 29 May 1985 before you hear it. If the suffering of families of the 96 victims of Hillsborough has been partially eased by this year's new inquests, there has been no such closure for the 39. Liverpool supporters are, understandably, not overeager to revisit the episode. Uefa, which chose the decrepit stadium and presided over the vaudeville that passed for safety control, has little interest in reliving its own shortcomings. More perplexing is the historical attitude of Juventus, some of whose executives and supporters have seemed tempted to erase Heysel from their history. "I think," said one Italian who was there but asked to speak off the record, "that for us it's like revisiting a terrible beating or a car crash. We won, but the victory meant nothing. Heysel is not so easy to talk about."

He was right, as I discovered when I called Phil Neal, Liverpool captain on the night. Would he meet me? "No," Neal said. "It was a day in my life that I want to forget.

A day that I do not want to revisit. I wouldn't wish what happened to me there to happen to anybody. It hurt me then and it hurts me more now, talking about it. You can hear," he said, conscious of the emotion in his voice, "how it hurt me. We've had an inquest on Hillsborough. Why," he added, "have I not been asked to give evidence to an inquest on Heysel? Our club secretary at Liverpool warned the authorities to think carefully about what they were doing."

Which was? "Staging the European Cup final in a stadium that was due for demolition. Why have I not been asked to an inquest?" Neal repeated, with feeling. "Why not? You can quote me on that."

Was Heysel the worst day of his life?

A pause. "What do you think?" Neal replied. "Yes. It was. On that day, I had to deal with a horrible situation. And that it has taken me a long time to recover. A very long time. Other than that," he continued, "I have nothing to say to you." Neal added, "Other than that, we never spoke. This conversation never took place."

When you look back at most episodes of tragic misadventure, it's usually possible to comprehend, if not excuse, the thinking of those responsible for planning them. That isn't so easy with Heysel. The stadium had been designed in the Twenties. The entire southern end was allocated to Juventus fans. The terrace behind the opposite goal was divided into three sections, X,Y and Z. X and Y were reserved for Liverpool fans. Tickets for section Z, the end of the terrace that adjoined Heysel's west stand, were to be sold only to Belgian residents. Many of these tickets wound up in the hands of travel agencies in Italy. Others were bought by members of the large Italian expatriate community centred round the old mining communities of Liège and Charleroi.

The result was that Liverpool fans, many still smarting from beatings administered by supporters of Roma at the previous year's final in the Italian capital, were placed next to what had become another Juventus section. The fans in section Z were mostly family groups. Juve's ultras, no slouches when it came to dispensing GBH, were at the far end of the ground. Section Z was separated from the English by wire of the kind used to enclose tennis courts. Beneath a hut at the back of the north terrace there were dozens of metre-long lengths of rigid plastic pipe, easily accessible to the curious visitor. What could possibly go wrong?

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At around 7pm BST, the time of the first incident, initiated by a handful of fans wearing Liverpool scarves, Simone Stenti - who was standing in section Z with his father, Domenico - told me there was one policeman standing between the rival supporters. "He tried to drive the first hooligan back,"

Stenti says. "The fan grabbed the truncheon and beat him up. No more police arrived." (Eight officers, who had been stationed between the fans, were outside the ground investigating a theft of around 600 Belgian francs - the equivalent of €22 - from a cash box at a hot-dog stand).

That first assault, Stenti recalls, involved mainly "flares fired deliberately at us" and projectiles: bottles and lumps of cement broken from Heysel's friable terracing. The Italians, he says, withdrew by five metres. In a second attack, the flimsy dividing fence was ripped down; a few Liverpool fans stepped over it. The Juventus supporters decamped further towards the 5ft-high wall on the west side of section Z.

The third, lethal onslaught began at 7.29pm. A wave of Liverpool fans swarmed at the Italians wielding broken bottles and metal bars. The Juve supporters, in panic, flocked into the bottom corner of their section where they found themselves trapped between the 5ft sidewall and a 3ft-high section of brickwork facing the pitch.

Both gave way.

Mario Fornelli, then director of a machine-tool company in Turin, looked on from his seat in the west stand. "The Italian section," Fornelli said, "was like a river of bodies swirling down the terrace. I knew people were dying. I was terrified. I now understand how wars start."

By 7.35pm most of the casualties: 32 Italians, four Belgians, two French and a Briton, Patrick Radcliffe of Downpatrick (an archivist for the European Commission) were already dead. All but one perished on or near the terrace, crushed or asphyxiated. The last, a 30-year-old Italian, died more slowly in hospital, from internal injuries. Commandant Alain Gibson was in charge of the paramedics. Most victims, he said, were "crushed or suffocated with hundreds of bodies on top of them. Some poor people," he added, "took ten minutes to die."

Simone Stenti, then 20, had gone to Heysel on impulse. He and his father had purchased the fatal grey tickets marked section Z at the last minute, from a tour operator in Milan. "It took ages to get in," Stenti told me, "because there was only one turnstile." He was neither searched, he added, nor required to show his ticket.

Stenti, now a TV journalist, recalls being surprised at how many Liverpool fans had been allowed to bring crates of Duvel and Chimay beer onto the terrace. Subject to the same relaxed admission procedure as the Italians, the Liverpool supporters (the great majority of whom, it should be emphasised, were more interested in watching football than they were in assaulting Italians) were themselves growing anxious about overcrowding. Some had got in without tickets; a few entered through holes in the crumbling stadium. Once inside, they found themselves in an area woefully inadequate for Liverpool's travelling support.

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Kenny Dalglish has repeatedly suggested that Juventus fans may have provoked the trouble by throwing missiles (although he has never condoned the behaviour of Liverpool supporters on that day); this was a story that circulated at the time, but not one for which I could find decisive corroboration.

When the first volley of rockets arrived, Stenti told me, "My dad said, 'Come on. Let's go.' I didn't want to leave. He made me.

And for that," he added, "I owe my father my life."

The pair were being crushed "with thousands of others" and found themselves pressed against a toilet block. "We found strength we didn't know we had," recalls Stenti. "I managed to lift my dad on to the toilet roof." They vaulted over a barbed wire fence, landing on the roof of an outhouse ten feet below. "My dad's hands were bleeding," Stenti says, "so we went to the Red Cross post. That's where we first saw dead bodies."

Stenti went onto the pitch, where some Belgian police were beating already traumatised Juventus fans with batons. He noticed "around 20 officers who were on horseback, which rendered them useless. Juventus players were coming over to see what was happening."

Did he speak to them? "Yes. I went up to Stefano Tacconi, the goalkeeper. He was trying to make sense of what he was seeing. I said, 'Stefano, listen: this isn't a football match any more. This is a tragedy.

Please don't play this match.'"

Did he listen? "Tacconi was just a kid then, like I was. What could he do?"

The medical provision at Heysel, where the crowd was 58,000, consisted of one doctor and 150 Red Cross volunteers. Some of the injured were helped by Juventus' medical team. "We knew [that people had died]," Tacconi said. "Our changing room looked like an A&E department."

Phil Neal and Juventus' captain Gaetano Scirea addressed the crowd and appealed for calm. Liverpool manager Joe Fagan, who was 64 and overseeing his last game, pleaded with the fans for order.

At Heysel, as on the Titanic, the entertainers played on. After a delay of more than 90 minutes, to the astonishment of many, the game went ahead; a surreal postscript to the tragic main event. "The match passed us by as though we were in a trance," Tacconi recalled, "or as if we had been drugged." Juventus' goal was a penalty converted by Michel Platini. It had been awarded by referee André Daina, even though the infringement was clearly outside the area. The Swiss official later failed to award a blatant penalty for the English side.

Scirea, a pivotal member of Italy's 1982 World Cup-winning side, would die in a car crash four years later in Poland, aged 36. "Gaetano said afterwards that he had not wanted to play at Heysel," his sister Annamaria told me. "He said that was the general feeling in the dressing room. I think he felt the players had no option but to carry on."

The decision to play had significant impact on some, not least Platini, whose exuberance during the Juventus lap of honour was widely regarded as being in questionable taste under the circumstances.

French author Jean-Philippe Leclaire wrote a sympathetic biography of Platini in which, he says, his subject offered a degree of friendly co-operation. When Leclaire started work on his 2005 book on Heysel, however, the player declined to assist.

A week after the 1985 final, in a column written for Paris Match, Platini denied having celebrated after the game. "It would have been out of the question to do a traditional lap of honour," he wrote, "showing off the cup." And yet, as Leclaire remarks, "Millions had already seen Platini on television, bare-chested, brandishing the cup at the Italian end."

Juventus had never won the European Cup and its directors were desperate to do so. The players' exuberance following what seemed a meaningless victory, at a time when bodies were still being laid out in a makeshift morgue, is still criticised by some of their own supporters. This contrast between the macabre backdrop to their triumph and the fervour with which it was celebrated is one of the reasons that Heysel remains such an awkward subject for many aficionados of the Turin-based side.

Platini has long ceased to comment on the final. On his 40th birthday, his wife, Christelle, spoke toFrance Football. "Heysel?" she said. "He never mentions it. He got it into his head that one of the people who died had gone there expressly to see him. He was devastated."

It's all too easy, I suggested to Liverpool centre-back Mark Lawrenson, to condemn a man's reaction in such a situation.

Platini's elation could have been a displaced expression of emotions outside the range usually generated by a football match: among them hysteria, rage, vengeance, even distress. How does a player adjust to such a situation? Did the Liverpool team know there had been fatalities? "We all knew," Lawrenson told me. "We were stopped from leaving our dressing room, which was below the wall that collapsed." A couple of his team-mates, including Alan Kennedy, had witnessed the devastation. "Somebody," Lawrenson continued, "told us that people had died out there. The Belgian chief of police came in. He said, 'You need to play this game.' Someone said, 'You're crazy. There are dead bodies.' He said, 'Yes. But I've already talked to Juventus. And my worry is that if you don't play this could escalate.'"

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A couple of minutes into the game, Lawrenson dislocated his shoulder. Although he missed the match - the footage of which he has never watched - Lawrenson was the first player to see what kind of emotions the tragedy would inspire. "They put me in an ambulance," he recalled. "They told me, 'Lie down.' I said, 'No, I'm more comfortable sitting up.' And they said, 'Seriously. Lie down.' Lawrenson entered the hospital unnoticed; not through the main entrance, but on a conveyor belt that carried him through "a kind of loading bay".

Regaining consciousness after the operation to replace his shoulder, he remembered, "I had all my kit on. I was in a big ward.

At the bottom of my bed," he added, "was an army guy with a machine gun. I began to stir. He raised a hand to stop me moving. A nurse arrived. She said, 'We've had to lock the door. There are relatives of the dead and injured here.'"

The next morning he was collected by his then wife, Vanessa, and coach Roy Evans. They were smuggled out in a service lift. "We had nothing to cover my Liverpool shirt," Lawrenson said, "apart from a club tracksuit. That was red, too. I had to wear it inside out."

What was the reaction as the Liverpool team coach left? "The Italians were spitting at us, yelling. All sorts. They wrote [abuse] on all the kit skips."

In a belated moment of prudence, the Belgian authorities allowed the bus to drive directly onto the tarmac at Brussels airport, avoiding any ugliness in the terminal building.

Once back in Liverpool, club chairman John Smith said that six men had approached him after the match, boasting that they had started the violence. These individuals, Smith said, claimed to represent "the National Front, from Chelsea. They led Liverpool fans into something they wouldn't usually get involved in."

Tony Evans, whose 2006 book, Far Foreign Land: Pride And Passion The Liverpool Way, offers an insightful account of events at Heysel, dismissed this suggestion as "a red herring.

Hooligans from the far right would not have been welcome." And, revisiting the footage of Heysel today, it's hard to disagree with Juventus fan Adolfo Perrone, who had travelled to see the game from his home in Galatina, Puglia, where he still lives. "If all of those people were from the National Front," said Perrone, "then there were thousands of them."

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Before Heysel, Margaret Thatcher had shown little interest in professional football, although two events earlier that year - the havoc wreaked by rioting Millwall fans at Luton in March and the fire at Bradford City on 11 May, which claimed 56 lives, had not escaped the prime minister's notice. The indignation of middle England was simmering nicely a fortnight before Heysel, when a *Sunday Times * editorial complained that English football was "a slum sport, played in slum stadiums, watched increasingly by slum people". In the immediate aftermath of Heysel, Liverpool reaped the whirlwind.

Novelist Anthony Burgess, commissioned by the Mail On Sunday, declared, "They [the Liverpudlians] just did not think. They were, and still are, stupid." The author of A *Clockwork Orange * added, "I would feel more tolerant if genuine Europeans exhibited the same imbecility. But they don't. It is the British who are regarded as the bad children of Europe. Why is this? Cleverer men than I have failed to explain what has gone wrong with the lower orders."

A Guardian writer called Liverpool fans "boozed-up cretins". "The city," muttered the Times, "has always had an undercurrent of violence."

Under pressure from Thatcher and her home secretary, Leon Brittan, the FA withdrew English clubs from European competition.

Uefa announced a five-year ban, extended by one year for Liverpool.

Rogan Taylor, now a senior lecturer in management at the University Of Liverpool, rose to prominence as the bright and articulate head of the fan's body, the Football Supporters'

Association. The organisation, he says, was formed "as a response to the horrors of Heysel. We weren't seeking to shift the blame, but [it was] an effort to pay the highest tribute to the dead and injured on a foreign field."

The historical significance of the 1985 final, Taylor told me, cannot be underestimated. "Heysel," he explained, "was one of the most important events in the history of the modern game. It signalled the death of old football and led directly to the formation of the Premier League."

Pondering their lengthy ban from Europe, said Taylor, "the big English clubs had to devise a way of increasing revenue, with attendances falling, star players moving abroad and no lucrative TV contracts." If you had to express the evolution of contemporary football as a mathematical formula, Taylor says, it would be: "Heysel plus Hillsborough plus satellite TV equals the Premier League."

Hillsborough is a topic that tends to crop up when you talk to Juventus fans about Heysel. Some, understandably, see the anguish and injustice endured by Liverpool fans, during and after the semifinal in Sheffield, as conclusive proof that there is a God and that he is just. "It sometimes appears to us," one fan told me, "that the people who died at Hillsborough are celebrated as martyrs, even heroes.

The 39 who died at Heysel are practically forgotten. That said," he added, "I am aware that what happened in Brussels was a shared tragedy. The deaths were undeniably caused by their hooligans, but I was standing in block Z that day and I can tell you: we are talking about a small percentage of Liverpool fans."

Most neutral observers recognise that a tragedy similar to that of Heysel could equally have been precipitated by other English clubs in that era of casual violence. "It could have been Manchester United when they rioted at Saint-Etienne in 1977," says Jean-Philippe Leclaire. "Just like it could have been Leeds and it could have been Tottenham."

The fact that it was Liverpool - without seeking to exonerate the behaviour of some that night - was the result of a grotesque confluence of idiocy (the choice of venue) laxity (control of ticket sales) and a Clouseauesque standard of policing. The Belgians are ridiculed by the French as the clowns of Europe; at Heysel, their authorities lived up to the stereotype.

Prior to the match, as Phil Neal had told me, Liverpool secretary Peter Robinson had written both to Uefa and to the Belgian FA warning them that the venue was dangerously unfit for purpose. Robinson no longer speaks publicly on the subject, but a statement he made shortly after the final makes his position clear. "If there had been a clear-cut Liverpool end and a Juventus end, there would have been no disaster at Heysel," he asserted. "I warned the Belgian FA weeks ago about the danger of a neutral area adjacent to the Liverpool section. They claimed that [section Z tickets] would only be sold to Belgians. When we arrived at the stadium, I said police would be needed [to segregate the "neutral" zone] and that the barriers, which they said police had approved the day before, would not be adequate."

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Heysel, as with many other tragedies, inspired acts of heroism. Otello Lorentini, a grandfather from Arezzo, had, like Simone Stenti, purchased section Z tickets for himself, his son Roberto and two nephews Andrea and Gianni from a travel agency.

Otello, who died last year, campaigned tirelessly for greater recognition for the 39. He encouraged his fellow Tuscan Francesco Caremani to produce his book, Heysel: Le Verità Di Una Strage Annunciata, first published in 2004. The book will appear in English as Heysel: The Truth later this year. Caremani's father worked at Arezzo hospital with Otello's son, Dr Roberto Lorentini, who was 31 when he accompanied his father to Heysel. "It was a foreseeable tragedy facilitated by the irresponsibility of the organisers and police," Otello Lorentini said, in an interview related by Caremani. "I told Roberto, 'Let's leave.' The English were throwing everything at us: metal, cement, stones. Then they charged. We retreated. There were women and children with us. I saw the wall getting closer."

Roberto, as a physician, attempted to stay behind and assist the injured. "I escaped through a gap at the top of the terrace," Otello Lorentini said. "Then I found myself on the pitch. I shouted Roberto's name. I saw my nephew Andrea with his head in his hands.

Roberto was lying on the terrace. I put my ear to his chest and listened. I thought I could hear a pulse, but I realised it was my own heart thumping. He was dead. A television crew was filming me.

Later, I saw footage of myself finding my dead son."

At the improvised morgue, Otello added, "The Belgians made us wait for more than three hours and showed us no respect. It was three in the morning by the time I saw my son's body. His gold neck chain and his wedding ring had disappeared. The Belgians claimed they had been taken 'for identification purposes'. Neither had his name on. They'd been stolen."

Gianni Stazio, Otello's second nephew, was with his uncle when he found Roberto's body. Stazio was among the supporters who berated Mark Lawrenson and his team-mates when, by chance, they encountered the Liverpool coach leaving Brussels. "We just couldn't contain our fury," Gianni said. "Some Belgians told us we should have fought back. I wish we had done. If we'd fought back, we might have been mourning fewer dead." (Dr Roberto Lorentini was posthumously awarded the Silver Medal for Civil Valour, the equivalent of the British George Cross, by the Italian government.)

Absurd as it may sound, I asked Lawrenson, did any good come out of Heysel? "I think only in the sense that it has never happened again," he replied. "Uefa have never made that sort of mistake again. It was madness. The stadium was crumbling. Which is not to excuse anything else that happened."

The day after the final, London Fire Brigade's then deputy chief, Gerry Clarkson, was despatched to Brussels charged with compiling a safety report. Clarkson, speaking on The Day Football Died, Brian Henry Martin's definitive 2005 RTE documentary, pronounced Heysel: "Unfit. In the stanchions that supported the crowd-control barriers, the reinforcing bars were exposed. They could not have contained even moderate pressure. The piers on the wall which collapsed were built the wrong way round."

The state of the ground, he concluded, was "beyond belief".

Clarkson was never able to give evidence at the kind of wide-ranging inquiry that many felt was required with Heysel. Such justice as there was would be dispensed in a piecemeal fashion. In April 1989, 14 Liverpool fans were convicted in Brussels of involuntary manslaughter. They typically received three-year sentences, of which half were suspended. Some were released, having served time on remand. The longest custodial sentence was four years. Three Italians were convicted, including Umberto Salussoglia, who had threatened police with a pistol and received a two-year sentence. In common with some others, including Alan Hansen, he declined to be interviewed for this article.

In 1989, Albert Roosens, former secretary general of the Belgian Football Union, received a six-month suspended sentence for regrettable negligence. Two senior police officers received similar punishments. Calls for the resignation of the nation's interior minister, Charles-Ferdinand Nothomb, went unheeded. Jacques Georges, former president of Uefa, escaped with a conditional discharge. "Do you think I am not revisited by visions of the blood running down terrace Z, and the piles of mutilated bodies?" Georges wrote, not long before his death in 2004, in a letter to Jean-Philippe Leclaire. "It is a burden I will carry to my death bed. But I am not going to discuss this in public."

Phil Neal's surprise at the lack of any co-ordinated inquest is forcefully reciprocated in Italy. In Arezzo, Otello Lorentini founded an association for relatives of Heysel victims. The organisation continues today as the Permanent Committee Against Violence In Sport, under the stewardship of his nephew Andrea.

It's a matter of record that Kenny Dalglish, in his role as Liverpool manager at the time of Hillsborough, worked tirelessly to comfort relatives of the dead, and once attended four funerals in a day. For many years the support offered by Juventus to the families of Heysel victims was less conspicuous. In 2005, the Italian side drew Liverpool in the quarterfinal of the Champions League. Before the first leg, at Anfield, Liverpool fans held up a mosaic reading Amicizia (friendship). Some Juventus fans turned their backs.

Leon Ferlat, now 63, who published a book about his experience at the final, noted that before the 2005 match, billed by both sides as a game of reconciliation, none of those who were injured or bereaved at Heysel were invited. "People weren't even telephoned," Ferlat said. "Not by Liverpool. Not by Juventus." The latter snub, he remarked, hurt more. Only a few years ago, Juventus' official website made almost no mention of Heysel. Francesco Caremani told me that when his book first appeared, the club declined to mention it on their site because they considered it unsuitable.

Since the arrival of club president Andrea Agnelli in 2010, the mood appears to have shifted. The Juventus site now pays tribute to those who died. The club's new stadium, which opened in 2011, has a handsome display of 39 stars, each marked with a name. In March this year a plan by the FA to send delegates, including Phil Neal, to lay a wreath before the Italy vs England friendly in Turin was vetoed by Juventus, who said such a gesture, while appreciated, might detract from their own memorial ceremony later this month.

For some Juventus fans though, the subject of Heysel remains taboo. Of those who helped me research this article, few were initially eager. Long after the final, Simone Stenti told me, he was visited by nightmares of crushed bodies with arms outstretched for help. These images, of the kind associated with medieval depictions of purgatory, are preserved in extraordinary, if disturbing, photographs taken at Heysel, notably by Eamon McCabe.

Even as an outsider, immersing yourself in the history of Heysel, you learn things you might have preferred not to know. One fan lost the power of speech for several months. Another went to his car only to discover that the keys were in the pocket of a companion whose corpse he had just identified at the morgue.

Guiseppe Spolaore, 14 when he went to Heysel, spoke of his shame at having walked over bodies to save himself; he hadn't yet learned that his father, who took him to the game as a treat, was dead. "But at least," he added, in a gentle and apologetic tone, "I was not wearing shoes. I'd lost my shoes."

Heysel stadium was demolished in 1994. In its place stands a contemporary facility renamed the King Baudoin Stadium, home to the national football team, many of whose followers are too young to have any memory of the old ground. Few were sorry to see the ageing ruin go. At least, somebody told me, it can't have taken much time or energy to knock Heysel down. But for some - as Andrea Lorentini, Leon Ferlat, Simone Stenti and many others could tell you - the memories it engendered may prove more difficult to erase.

Origionally published in the June 2015 issue of British GQ, out now in print and as a digital edition that you can download for your iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire or Android device.

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