Skip to main content
Read page text
page 6
PassThe Report permanently manned. There is also reference to the need to improve emergency access, public address systems and radio communications between police and ground staff. Popplewell clearly would have liked to prompt removal of all security fences, citing the accepted fact that their absence saved fives at Bradford. A distaste for fences is exemplified by the following: “They enable fans to identify with their own supporters. They create a sense o f camaraderie and immunity from attack. They polarise the respective factions. They create a worse standard of behaviour because the fans feel they are being treated as violent people. ” There have been problems of crowd safety since the beginning of the century and reports have been written on them since the overcrowding at the 1923 Cup Final. A self appointed Departmental Committee On Crowds compiled that report, without the aid of the FA (surprisingly enough) and tackled just about every basic problem of crowd management. The Burnden Park disaster in 1946 when 33 people died due to crushing caused by sudden influx of late arrivals, proved that nothing had changed. There were no continuous barriers to minimise surges and no gangways, people gained illegal entry and a barrier collapsed, though the ground was not a particularly unsafe by the generally abysmal standards of the time. An enquiry identified the need for the licensing of football grounds, subject to safety inspections. However, the recommendation was a voluntary one and most clubs voluntarily choose to ignore it. The Lang Report of 1969 called for more seating, and for licensing to be compulsory. This particular point was repeated in the Wheatley and Chester reports soon after. Plainly, tlje.existence of the problem was common knowledge, but there simply wasn’t sufficient administrative conviction to do anything. Fifty-one years after the first recommendations were published, firm action was finally provoked by another disaster, Ibrox in 1971. The Safety Of Sports Grounds Act (1975) made licensing of grounds compulsory for 1st and 2nd Division clubs. It was subject to safety requirements which were to be monitored by local authorities. The nature of these requirements were set out in the Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds, or Green Code, the terms of which were still only voluntary. Most enquiries have little hope of forming the basis of significant change. They are out of date by the time of publication and their general lack of conviction suggests the author expects his work to be largely disregarded. This pattern runs through the whole spectrum of disaster reports. The author of the Moorgate Tube Report was so Bumden Park, 1946 preoccupied with the mysterious cause of the crash, ie the seemingly inexplicable actions of the driver, that his list of other safety shortcomings, (deficiencies in fire equipment, rescue access, communications, smoke extraction, staff response etc) were given insufficient attention. It will be little comfort to the relatives of the Kings Cross fire victims to know that recommendations were also made to remove combustible building materials from the London Underground network. Flicking through these weighty tomes is no fun. The formal investigation into the Zeebrugge ferry disaster holds some morbid fascination. “Obviously the doors need to be watertight, to ensure the buoyancy of the superstructure.. ” is one useful conclusion. Plainly, many of its recommendations are not worth the paper I photocopied them on. The Herald o f Free Enterprise was safe according to the 1980 Merchant Shipping Regulations, but it is now recognised that unstable craft could conform to this legislation. Clearly a case for change you would think. However, these ships still sail across the channel, because only those built to comply with the 1964 Act are recommended to be phased out. Comforting isn’t it? The investigation only strikes a chord when it remarks, “It is essential that conclusions are at arms length from purely commercial considerations. ” Replace this sentence with “We know that safety has always been secondary to financial considerations but... ” and the true extent of the report’s influence might be more accurately gauged. There is no doubt that the problem which developed at Hillsborough would not have been allowed to escalate to the extent that it did had the recommendations of the Popplewell Enquiry (which needless to say echoed much of the preceding Green Guide To Safety) been fully implemented. The report refers specifically to the provision of adequate numbers of safe exit gates in security fences which should be — 6 — Despite having already written about the safety problems related to fences, he excuses their existence: “For practical reasons, however, it is not possible to allow rival fans to be present at a game unless they are both segregated and penned in. ” It does not seem likely that the fences would have come down had Popplewell called for such a measure, as this would have been vetoed by the police. However, the report was primarily concerned with hooliganism, which meant he was unable to even suggest it. The problem that every disaster shares is the burden of an apathetic and powerless enquiry system after the event, in which other concerns take precedence over the safety considerations that seemed so vital at the time of the tragedy. Even now, some clubs place their historic fear of hooliganism above safety in their determination to keep the fences up. But neither should panic measures and panaceas be grabbed at out of sheer frustration. The most lasting and effective change usually happens over a long period of time. And an enquiry should play an important part in that learning process. But such enquiries have become so much part of the ritual of disaster that they disinform more than help us to learn. They are too often a halfhearted sop to calm troubled waters at the time of tragedy and in the long term allow things to carry on pretty much as before. Hillsborough doesn’t look like being an exception. Doug Cheeseman
page 7
Sitting Bull In the wake ofthe Hillsborough disaster media pundits andfootball’s bosses have turned to all-seater stadia as a cure-all. George Binette, once a fanatical follower of baseball’s Boston Red Sox, examines the misconceptions about, and the reality of, professional sport in the US. low-key policing at most US grounds. While I’ve seen mounted police crush pitch ‘invasions’with swift brutality as fans simply sought to celebrate a key victory, the police are often conspicuous by their absence both inside and outside grounds. After all, there are often no visitors to herd in like cattle, (and no perimeter fencing either except behind baseball’s home plate). Change the composition of the audience, however and the attitudes of the police and media change dramatically. Clearly, the allseater Riverfront Stadium in Cincinatti, Ohio, did nothing to prevent the stampede which claimed the lives of 25 fans of The Who in 1979. The again, they were probably drug-crazed youth, and, so, culpable in the eyes of the media. Rap concerts have been a target for police bullying in recent years, as the largely young, black audiences are branded as criminal and bands like Public Enemy acquire cult hero status by being banned from many venues. July 1968: my first ever visit to Fenway Park, home of the defending American League champions, Boston’s Red Sox. Coming from a hopelessly sheltered middle class background, the afternoon did much to expand my vocabulary and introduced me to public drunkenness. As everywhere, the surrounding fans commentary seemed better informed than anything on radio or television. This idyllic afternoon wasn’t always to be repeated on later visits to the ball park. In later years, fights were commonplace outside the ground and I had personal knowledge of a stabbing at a match against the New York Yankees. True, professional sport in the US has no ugly appendages to rival the ICF, but the image of universally well-behaved supporters is false. At gridiron football contests in northern cities, fans have been known to pelt visiting players with snowballs, ice and assorted rubbish in the middle of play. Occasionally, such incidents do gain local coverage but national network cameras crews seem instructed to steer clear of focusing on spectator aggro. With the partial exception of the Cleveland Browns’increasingly notorious ‘Dog Pound’, these dangerous attacks have not brought down the wrath of righteous newspaper editors. In short, the question of crowd control has generated no moral panic in the media. At most matches, the opportunity for assaulting an opposing player will probably exceed that for attacking a rival supporter; quite simply because the visitors will have very few fans with them, even for playoff games. The time, distance and cost of intercity travel in the US make it virtually impossible for anyone but the richest to follow their team from week to week, home and away. In addition, if your side is on the road, live television is almost always available. At a price of £600 million, the sale of contractual rights to the networks furnish far greater revenue than similar agreements entered into by the Football League. This source of profits dwarfs even the sums made from regularly filling 80,000 seater stadia to capacity. There can be little doubt that the US franchises, which openly admit to being part of the highly competitive ‘family entertainment’industry, do reinvest in improving spectator facilities available to fans. Armchair Support Lavatories are generally heated, spacious and clean (and not just by comparison to British grounds). Food and drink are more readily available and the programme vendors come to you. Fans, though, pay a steep price for such relative advantages, as even the cheapest seats (with an impossibly distant view of the pitch) go for £9 or more at gridiron matches. The post-war period, especially the first years of the long economic boom, saw a rapid rise in the number of cities hosting big-time commercial sport. Often, new stadia were built on greenfield sites, miles away from city centres, creating higher expenses and monumental traffic jams as well as restricting still further the access of black enthusiasts, largely confined to inner city ghettos. The frequent isolation of the stadia, the absence of ‘criminal’elements (eg black youth and away fans) partially explain the Political Football In the US, four mass spectator sports are very big business indeed. Local governments and chambers of commerce often pin their hopes for economic regeneration on enticing or retaining baseball and football franchises, lavishing tens of millions of state funds to construct or refurbish stadia. Major tax concessions to club owners are also routine in ‘rust-belt’ cities like Buffalo. Despite the intense economic competition between cities to play host to a major league team, and the real battle for the consumer’s dollar, rivalries in American sport pale into insignificance in comparison to the sectarian tensions of an Old Firm match, or the North London emnity of Arsenal and Spurs. A host of factors including league expansion, franchise moves and media overkill, with gridiron football actually structured around the requirements of commercial television, have diminished the significance of collective identification with a team. The sudden success of a ‘Cinderella’ club can still create mass hysteria, the noise can literally deafen in an American football stadium (exceeding 100 decibels on the pitch) but there is little chanting and absolutely no singing beyond the inevitable national anthem. Almost all the professional sports complexes in the US offer greater comfort to the vast majority of players than virtually any in England. Seats, albeit cold, hard, plastic ones, are an element in that comfort, which US fans expect in exchange for their loyalty and money. But whether the policy of reserved seats and benches only is really responsible for the ostensibly impressive safety record of US stadiums remains a questionable proposition. Professional sport doesn’t unfold in a vacuum, hermetically sealed off from society as a whole, however much we may wish it to be. Whether or not seating could have prevented Hillsborough is a question out of context. To purge the terraces (and many of the supporters on them) in the name o f American-style’progress is an answer without context, indeed no answer at all. George Binette

Page Text

View plaintext

PassThe Report permanently manned. There is also reference to the need to improve emergency access, public address systems and radio communications between police and ground staff.

Popplewell clearly would have liked to prompt removal of all security fences, citing the accepted fact that their absence saved fives at Bradford. A distaste for fences is exemplified by the following: “They enable fans to identify with their own supporters. They create a sense o f camaraderie and immunity from attack. They polarise the respective factions. They create a worse standard of behaviour because the fans feel they are being treated as violent people. ”

There have been problems of crowd safety since the beginning of the century and reports have been written on them since the overcrowding at the 1923 Cup Final. A self appointed Departmental Committee On Crowds compiled that report, without the aid of the FA (surprisingly enough) and tackled just about every basic problem of crowd management.

The Burnden Park disaster in 1946 when 33 people died due to crushing caused by sudden influx of late arrivals, proved that nothing had changed. There were no continuous barriers to minimise surges and no gangways, people gained illegal entry and a barrier collapsed, though the ground was not a particularly unsafe by the generally abysmal standards of the time.

An enquiry identified the need for the licensing of football grounds, subject to safety inspections. However, the recommendation was a voluntary one and most clubs voluntarily choose to ignore it.

The Lang Report of 1969 called for more seating, and for licensing to be compulsory. This particular point was repeated in the Wheatley and Chester reports soon after. Plainly, tlje.existence of the problem was common knowledge, but there simply wasn’t sufficient administrative conviction to do anything.

Fifty-one years after the first recommendations were published, firm action was finally provoked by another disaster, Ibrox in 1971. The Safety Of Sports Grounds Act (1975) made licensing of grounds compulsory for 1st and 2nd Division clubs. It was subject to safety requirements which were to be monitored by local authorities. The nature of these requirements were set out in the Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds, or Green Code, the terms of which were still only voluntary.

Most enquiries have little hope of forming the basis of significant change. They are out of date by the time of publication and their general lack of conviction suggests the author expects his work to be largely disregarded.

This pattern runs through the whole spectrum of disaster reports. The author of the Moorgate Tube Report was so

Bumden Park, 1946

preoccupied with the mysterious cause of the crash, ie the seemingly inexplicable actions of the driver, that his list of other safety shortcomings, (deficiencies in fire equipment, rescue access, communications, smoke extraction, staff response etc) were given insufficient attention. It will be little comfort to the relatives of the Kings Cross fire victims to know that recommendations were also made to remove combustible building materials from the London Underground network.

Flicking through these weighty tomes is no fun. The formal investigation into the Zeebrugge ferry disaster holds some morbid fascination. “Obviously the doors need to be watertight, to ensure the buoyancy of the superstructure.. ” is one useful conclusion. Plainly, many of its recommendations are not worth the paper I photocopied them on. The Herald o f Free Enterprise was safe according to the 1980 Merchant Shipping Regulations, but it is now recognised that unstable craft could conform to this legislation.

Clearly a case for change you would think. However, these ships still sail across the channel, because only those built to comply with the 1964 Act are recommended to be phased out. Comforting isn’t it?

The investigation only strikes a chord when it remarks, “It is essential that conclusions are at arms length from purely commercial considerations. ” Replace this sentence with “We know that safety has always been secondary to financial considerations but... ” and the true extent of the report’s influence might be more accurately gauged.

There is no doubt that the problem which developed at Hillsborough would not have been allowed to escalate to the extent that it did had the recommendations of the Popplewell Enquiry (which needless to say echoed much of the preceding Green Guide To Safety) been fully implemented. The report refers specifically to the provision of adequate numbers of safe exit gates in security fences which should be

— 6 —

Despite having already written about the safety problems related to fences, he excuses their existence: “For practical reasons, however, it is not possible to allow rival fans to be present at a game unless they are both segregated and penned in. ” It does not seem likely that the fences would have come down had Popplewell called for such a measure, as this would have been vetoed by the police. However, the report was primarily concerned with hooliganism, which meant he was unable to even suggest it.

The problem that every disaster shares is the burden of an apathetic and powerless enquiry system after the event, in which other concerns take precedence over the safety considerations that seemed so vital at the time of the tragedy. Even now, some clubs place their historic fear of hooliganism above safety in their determination to keep the fences up.

But neither should panic measures and panaceas be grabbed at out of sheer frustration. The most lasting and effective change usually happens over a long period of time. And an enquiry should play an important part in that learning process. But such enquiries have become so much part of the ritual of disaster that they disinform more than help us to learn. They are too often a halfhearted sop to calm troubled waters at the time of tragedy and in the long term allow things to carry on pretty much as before. Hillsborough doesn’t look like being an exception.

Doug Cheeseman

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content