Duckenfield on trial

[stripeyfox]

On 30/11/2019 at 11:56, yorkie1999 said:

I know everyone wants to hang him high but i think he's the fall guy in a long list of culpable bodies. I mean, what idiot thinks that the way to control a crowd is to put them in cages where there's no escape. One mistake, such as what happened at HIllsbourough through one person either forgetting, not realising or purposly not instructing a gate  to be closed before another one was opened and there's going to eventually be a tragedy. It's no coincidence that after the hillsborough disaster the fences started coming down and other methods were used for crowd control, why? because the powers that be realised they'd cocked up, how come they've never been held to be responsible. Who, in the FA, decided to carry on using hillsborough for semi finals even though there'd been problems with crushes in the leppings lane end before due to the fact of it's bottle neck problems and the one terrace being split up into three pans which the invalidated the grounds safety certificate. I know it was a tragedy that all those fans died but imagine if they'd been a fire in there at some time, with nowhere to escape!! Football fans really were treated like animals by the establishment.

A lot of what you say has some merit, but it is worth remembering that Mr Duckenfield's predecessor managed the Semi Final at Hillsborough between the same teams the previous year and that game passed off without incident. He had ticket checks and cordons around the ground to control the flow of people to the stadium. If Duckenfield had bothered to read the plan, or attempted to familarise himself with the situation then perhaps he might have done the same.

 

That said, I think it was inevitable that there was going to be a major incident somewhere, even if it had not been that day at Hillsborough. It seemed that football was barrelling headlong into an abyss throughout the 70's and 80' at the time. Even Bradford and Heysel didn't alter this downward spiral. Hillsborough was a watershed moment.