How a simple football match ended in horror, scandal and 96 Liverpool FC fans dead. An insider’s story of the tragedy that changed English soccer forever. By Ryan Dixon Even with brilliant blue skies overhead, the gathering storm at Hillsborough Stadium was clear to Bruce Grobbelaar. Every time the Liverpool FC goalkeeper went behind his net to retrieve an errant ball during his team’s FA Cup semifinal game with Nottingham Forrest, he heard desperate pleas from Reds supporters fighting for the air in their lungs. “People were yelling, ‘Bruce, can you please help us, save us? They’re killing us!'” he says. “I’m thinking to myself, Who? I didn’t realize the surge of the people from the back was crushing the people in the front.” Standing Liverpool fans crammed into two crude pens directly behind their team’s goal were scrambling for survival; some tried to scale 10-foot-high fences to freedom, others were being pulled to safety in the first row of balcony seats above. Neither option was available to people pressed against the crush barrier at the front. Unable to move in the compressed mob, the life was being squeezed from their bodies. “You could see the faces being pushed against the meshing,” says Grobbelaar. At that point, he pleaded with a policewoman to unlatch a gate that granted access to the field, but was told she didn’t have the authority. Minutes passed and the crush worsened. When the small gate was finally opened, people could only slip through one at a time. With fans now streaming onto the pitch, play was suspended. Some players intuitively moved away from the mayhem, but Grobbelaar got involved. Along with teammate Steve Nicol, he began dismantling the triangular advertising boards that lined the field and using the pieces as makeshift stretchers. “That’s what we started doing until we were dragged away by one of the coaches,” he says. Once in the locker room, Grobbelaar and his teammates were told to stay loose, because despite what had already gone on it seemed the game could yet resume. In the chaos, the teary-eyed Liverpool supporters started coming through the door, talking about seeing dead bodies. First, it was reports of two or three. Then 20 or 30. “It just kept going up,” Grobbelaar says. By the time the game was cancelled and the Reds were told to go home, it was clear something had gone horribly wrong, but the scale of the tragedy had yet to be revealed. “We had a shower, jumped on the bus and didn’t know the full magnitude until, virtually, we got into Liverpool,” Grobbelaar says. “We kept listening to the radio and the disaster just carried on.” In the end, 96 Liverpool fans died. And English soccer would never be the same.

April 15, 1989, was just begging for a soccer match. “It was a perfect day,” Grobbelaar says. That was the backdrop as fans who’d made the two-hour drive from Liverpool to Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium began arriving for the 3 p.m. game. It was a familiar voyage for many; the same clubs had played at Hillsborough a year earlier in a Cup semifinal. Liverpool fans were directed toward the Leppings Lane entrance of the stadium, where they could make their way to the standing terraces behind the Reds goal. There were sufficient turnstiles there to handle a steady trickle of people, but not a large mass. In an era when hooliganism was still a prevalent problem, the standing terrace was divided into pens. For years these pens rountinely became densely packed with bodies. “There was a Royal Marine who was six-foot-five and 17 stone [about 240 lb.] and he said [during a game in 1987] he got lifted off his feet, the crush was so bad,” says Mike Nicholson, who’s made a web-based documentary about Hillsborough. The critical error that separated the fatal 1989 game from other contests occurred when the South Yorkshire Police decided to open Gate C—an exit gate designed to allow large crowds of people to leave the stadium—to alleviate the growing stress around the turnstiles, which were overburdened because barriers regulating the flow of people were not erected that day. For the large numbers of people now using a gaping exit gate as an entrance, the natural course of action was to descend on a tunnel marked “Standing” that led toward the two already-packed central pens. Though massive problems were brewing at the other end of the sloping tunnel, all the arriving fans could see was a glimpse of the sun-splashed goal Grobbelaar was guarding. “It was almost like a moth to a flame,” says Nicholson. There was talk of delaying kickoff for 15 minutes while things got sorted out, but the game went ahead as planned. Fans streamed in to avoid missing the action, further packing the section. The combined power of the crowd was immense. Before the match was six minutes old, supporters were spilling onto the field and play was suspended. But the damage was done. Nearly a quarter-century later, the events of the Hillsborough disaster linger on, especially for family and friends of the 96 people who needlessly lost their lives; people who went to watch a soccer game and never came home.