He never has. The Heysel Stadium it was and the Heysel Stadium Disaster it will forever be. An accursed monument to the hooliganisation of football, a plague spawned in England and with which our national game continues to contaminate Europe. Liverpool fans were carriers of the English disease then, inflamed as they were by their drunken belief that they could travel without match tickets yet with some divine right to watch the game. They forced entry through a neglected hole at the rear wall of that ageing stadium, flattened some rickety wire fencing and stampeded the Italian occupants off the adjacent terrace and into that wall of death.
Fate can be quick and terribly cruel.
Again, it was the innocent who suffered. Again, we bore helpless witness. This time the dead and dying were lifted away on wooden advertisement hoardings torn from behind the FA Cup semi-final touchlines. This time a father, irrational in his distress, begged us to cross the pitch and peer through the door of the gymnasium to where his child lay among the rows of bodies, so incongruously neat as to seem at horizontal attention. Heysel pronounced English football leprous and we were banished to the wilderness for five years to seek a cure.