IAN HERBERT: Sheffield Wednesday’s scandalous cover-up shows a weaselly club with no humility

It was the fall of 1989 when I started in this profession. It was a blur of learning, reporting and trying to write, but the predominant memory is worrying, day in and day out, with a teenager on a life support machine.

Tony Bland had been crushed, like so many others, in the Hillsborough disaster five months earlier, his excruciating injuries leaving him in a persistent vegetative state. We reported on his family’s fight simply to be allowed to withdraw life-prolonging treatment and allow him to die with dignity. That took four years.

The family patiently endured my questions throughout that bleak fall, as they grappled with something that no one who loves an 18-year-old, the way they did, should ever have to experience.

We write the stories for the Liverpool Daily Post, in a city where the memories of Hillsborough were still alive. Although it now seems like a lifetime ago, Tony’s is the name that comes to mind whenever questions arise about safety at a football stadium.

It would take authorities 20 years to conclude that Sheffield Wednesday would not be prosecuted for the role they played in the gross negligence that claimed 97 lives in that disaster. By then, the club had new owners, so it had effectively become a new organization, free of criminal liability.

Wednesday’s club secretary, Graham Mackrell, was fined £6,500 for deciding that seven turnstiles would be enough for Liverpool’s 10,100 fans, on that bright April day. Mackrell did not testify at his trial. He replied ‘No comment’ to all questions from the police.

That is a monumental weight of history for a club to carry. The kind of moral and reputational charge you imagine would have made Sheffield Wednesday say ‘never again’ and sent a bolt of electricity through that club on 7th January this year, when Newcastle United supporters described their experience at Hillsborough before an FA Cup tie. .

Those fans told my colleague Craig Hope about the narrow access tunnels, non-existent crowd management, and crying children. A feeling of being crushed. There was a terrible ring of familiarity.

But there was no electricity. There wasn’t even the courtesy of a returned phone call from Sheffield Wednesday when some of us called to share testimonials from Newcastle fans.

Needless to say, there was no shortage of communication of that contemptible and contemporary kind for those of us who reported or mentioned these testimonials. A diatribe of sickening abuse ensued, often anonymously, from Twitter geeks too fragile or intellectually challenged to see a genuine investigative act for what it is.

There can’t be a question too much to ensure there will be no more Tony Blands, no more Hillsboroughs, yet a distorted sense of victimhood and loyalty removed the remotest care for fans of a different stripe.

The Twitter abuse took on a celebratory tone, a few weeks ago, due to what Wednesday and Sheffield City Council described as a “review” of crowd management on the day in question. This was said to have found all aspects of security ‘compliant’ with the club’s security certificate. Only “minor recommendations” had been made.

The Sheffield Star reported on this ‘strong’ review and a 531-word ‘robust’ statement from the club.

Wednesday’s COO Liam Dooley just “welcomed” it all. Copy of the press release. There was less of that in ’89. It was nonsense. A despicable and cynical cover-up, calculated to cover up the fact that the notorious Leppings Lane winger had rallied hundreds more fans than he should have been doing, 34 years after Wednesday presiding over the darkest day in British football.

Well the truth is out now. Full details of the glitches, which I was told on Wednesday they had not seen and Sheffield City Council refused to offer me an answer, have been made public, though Newcastle United have required a Freedom of Information request to get them out.

Minor recommendations? The safety committee that examined fan complaints concluded that 15 measures were needed. The Leppings Lane stand should be reduced from 4,700 to 3,700 – 1,000 fewer fans in a stand that doesn’t even hold 5,000. Four new turnstiles must be added. Crowd safety consultants should be appointed. Security cameras should be improved.

An apology to Newcastle United fans for a terrifying experience would have revealed a bit of class, but forget any notion of it. All we’ve had are those weasel words from Mr. Dooley and others, with their vicious little subtext that says, “everything’s fine, there’s nothing to see here, you’re making a racket.” What an affront to football. What an absolute shame.

The cover-up suggests that nothing has changed when it comes to Wednesdays. If this club had an ounce of humility and self-awareness they would have cleaned the stain on their history years ago by demolishing the God forsaken stand in Leppings Lane. They would have rebuilt and renamed their entire stadium. There would be no ‘Hillsborough’.

This was the case at Heysel Stadium, rebuilt and renamed King Baldouin Stadium, a decade after the 1985 disaster that killed 39 Juventus fans.

Forget that notion too. The fundamental structure of the notorious end of Leppings Lane is still intact. So too, the tunnel that is synonymous with disaster, another haunting reminder of the sport’s darkest day.

Browse images of Leppings Lane from time to time. You would think that nothing bad has ever happened. Extraordinary, really. A scandal in sight.

In Liverpool, there will be an air of grim familiarity with all this, given the obfuscation, backsliding and lies its people associate with the word ‘Hillsborough’.

When thousands of previously undisclosed documents relating to the tragedy were made public by the Hillsborough Independent Panel report in 2012, Sheffield Wednesday issued an apology to the families of those who had died. In fact, they praised their own ‘fully transparent’ contribution to that process.

It was one more sequence of empty, sterile, choreographed words from a club that is full of them and for whom history clearly means nothing.

EVERTON SHOWS THE WAY TO REFUGEES

The history of those who seek refuge on these shores was lost in that extraordinary controversy over the right to tweet but it is still there, of course.

I wish Everton had gotten as much publicity for the way they work – quietly, determinedly and unceremoniously – on this monumentally complicated issue.

It was through them that I met a young man named Jacob Viera at Goodison Park five years ago.

The turtleneck he wore did not fully hide the scars on his neck caused by drug gangs who had tried to electrocute him for refusing to transport their drugs across the Kenyan border when he was traveling to play elite youth soccer.

He had been picked up for weekly training sessions, run by Everton’s community department for displaced youth seeking refuge and asylum in the city of Liverpool. Jacob has since become a local referee and last year he was appointed administrator of the Liverpool County Football Association.

It took more than a tweet to change his life.

LET’S HOPE WILFRIED DOESN’T DISAPPEAR IN THE DESERT

There’s nothing Saudi Arabia can’t buy but Wilfried Zaha, a brilliant, experienced and exciting winger who has given Crystal Palace their best years but, at 30 and without a contract this summer, will be the star of another person. acquisition.

If Zaha really covets his money, then let his destination be Newcastle, not some place in Al-Ittihad, the doomsville in the same desert where Cristiano Ronaldo is playing his time.