The abuse comes with the turf when you write about football. The fragile and the delusional, whipping themselves into a conviction that it’s all a conspiracy. That you’ve got it in for their club.
The worst I’ve known has come from a fringe of Sheffield Wednesday fans who were extremely affronted a few years ago when my colleague Craig Hope and I had the temerity to report that young Newcastle United fans – children – felt squashed and scared, some in tears, because of overcrowding in Hillsborough’s Leppings Lane End.
A stadium and stand where you imagine they would go to the end of the earth to make people feel safe.
There was not even the courtesy of a returned phone call from Wednesday when we first put the Newcastle fans’ testimonies to them. Just a fanbase abusing us and ridiculing those supporters for complaining.
The white noise actually helps you at times. Motivates you to go that little bit further. A Freedom of Information request yielded the minutes of Sheffield Council’s Safety Advisory Group, which dropped into my inbox one day and laid out the full story of Hillsborough’s inadequacy.
There was the spot safety check that had found ‘insufficient turnstiles’ to service the Kop – the home stand opposite the Leppings Lane End. The inadequate briefing of stewards. The inadequate numbers of stewards.
Hillsborough’s Leppings Lane End, scene of the worst disaster in English football history
Newcastle fans felt squashed and scared in the same end during an FA Cup tie there in January 2023 – Sheffield Wednesday responded by banning Mail Sport over our reporting on it
The conclusion, by one Manchester-based consultancy, that the Leppings Lane upper concourse, where those Newcastle fans felt unsafe, was ‘not capable of accommodating the numbers required’. The capacity there was immediately reduced by 1,300.
An apology to Newcastle United fans for a frightening experience would have revealed a little class but it never came, and Mail Sport has been banned from attending matches at the stadium because of our reporting ever since.
Our exclusion seems to have been driven by Wednesday’s owner, the Thai billionaire Dejphon Chansiri, who decided in 2019 that the ground would be sold to him for £60million to ensure that the club didn’t breach spending rules. He earns rent on it.
Wednesday don’t like the Hillsborough Disaster being brought up in a contemporary setting, yet this obfuscation and dissembling has distinct echoes of the failings after that April day in 1989. One’s instinctive reaction is ‘how dare they?’ How dare Wednesday block and ban when it was an economy with the truth – lies and cover-ups – which kept Liverpool fans waiting for answers for so long?
There was too much detail in those documents I received to report everything in these pages, though concerns about the stadium’s North Stand were another consistent theme. Some 60-year-old bolts in that edifice’s steelwork were ‘loose or absent,’ I read. There was corrosion of ‘exposed steel work’ and ‘cracks’ in the terracing.
The documents charted Wednesday’s assurances that all would be well and everything was in hand. ‘Person responsible: SWFC. Deadline ASAP.’ But it turns out they didn’t get around to it.
The minutes of June’s Stadium Advisory Group committee minutes, obtained by the BBC under another FoI request, have just revealed that the North Stand’s inadequacies leave the council unsatisfied that Hillsborough is actually safe to stage a football match at all.
In the words of the safety group, there is ‘currently no professional reassurance as to the safety of the North Stand structure’. There is ‘extensive corrosion’ in the stand’s ‘main steel roof trusses’.
Owner Dejphon Chansiri is one of the most unpopular in England, and we suspect he has had a role in our ban
How dare Wednesday block and ban when it was an economy with the truth – lies and cover-ups – which kept Liverpool fans waiting for answers for so long?
The council have not, as yet, granted Wednesday a safety certificate to stage games. The club have asked the EFL for an away fixture on the first day of the new season – Leicester City, on Sunday week – to give them more time to fix the problem. Their first home match is less than three weeks away, on August 16 against Stoke City.
Needless to say, they insist it’s all in hand. ‘Person responsible: SWFC. Deadline ASAP.’
As all this unfolds, my mind returns to a Liverpudlian called Dave Golding, who I met 10 years back. His uncle was Arthur Horrocks, a ‘man from the ‘Pru’, who set off for Hillsborough in his yellow Triumph Toledo on that fateful Spring day in 1989, leaving behind a wife and two sons, aged eight and six, who would never see him again.
Dave told me that he hoped that his uncle’s death had, in some indefinable way, made football a less complacent place.
The abuse from the darker recesses of the social media swamp is irrelevant. Water off a duck’s back. And we’ll certainly live with that ban.
But it’s harder to contend with the bare-faced insult which Wednesday’s approach to safety represents for those Liverpool families who believed something good and lasting would come from their own horror and the loss.
It seems they were wrong. What a disgrace.
We will not turn a blind eye to Morecambe
No word has been forthcoming from the egregious Jason Whittingham, who crashed Worcester Warriors and, as I wrote here last week, is now proceeding to drive Morecambe FC over the same cliff.
The picture has worsened in the past 48 hours. Morecambe have now been suspended from the National League, whose administrators are not satisfied the club has the financial means to complete the season.
It means they will not play in the division during the first weeks of the new season.
If legislation creating a football regulator had been passed earlier, then there would have been the means to seize and save this club, though that won’t happen.
All that can be said is that Morecambe’s fans are not forgotten. We will be looking under every stone to find the one under which Whittingham, the reptile, lurks.
Jason Whittingham (left) has already run Worcester Warriors into the ground – now he is on the brink of doing the same with Morecambe FC
Morecambe have been suspended from the National League – we will not turn a blind eye to this
A privilege of a lifetime
It was the privilege of a lifetime to be there, at the St. Jakob-Park stadium to witness the Lionesses retain their European title. For me, a football occasion surpassing any other in 18 years reporting on sport, and a victory build a lot more than blood and thunder.
Houghton shines off the pitch too
It must hurt Steph Houghton, Lionesses captain and driving force for so long, to have missed out on all this glory, but hers was the punditry which my family, watching on at home, were eulogising about when I arrived home on Monday night.
Development of women’s game is a joy to behold
I recommend the fascinating report on the final produced by UEFA’s Technical Observer Group, which details the very nuanced tactical way England wrested back a game which seemed lost to them.
The UEFA Technical Observer Group’s report found that there was a much higher technical level of football than at previous tournaments, with far fewer major mistakes
Their ‘box midfield’ drew out Spain’s midfielders, and Ella Toone and Georgia Stanway adopted higher positions to stretch the world champions.
The Observer Group’s report also finds that there was a much higher technical level of football than at previous tournaments, with far fewer major mistakes.
It concludes that what the women’s game needs next is players able ‘to read the game and to adapt to the different situations that can come up during a match because, as seen in this tournament, teams are able to change things’.
Sarina Wiegman’s England more than demonstrated that in Basel. The rapid development of women’s football is a joy to behold, laughing in the face of those cynics who cannot see beyond their dull obsession with that fact the men who play elite football happen to be stronger and faster.
