Newsgroup: it.sport.calcio.estero
Titolo: Osservazioni condivisibili

E' molto lungo ma e' (secondo il mio parere) il piu' pacato e ragionato
articolo sui fatti dell'Heysel. Meno male che stasera si gioca e questa
pagina si chiudera' per sempre nella storia.
Stasera vorrei vedere e sentire parlare solo di calcio in TV. Il modo
migliore per "andare avanti".
Arianna
 
         Lost lives that saved a sport
Award-winning author Andrew Hussey, from Liverpool, explains why Heysel was
the inevitable result of a brutalised era and tells how a game rebuilt
itself from the rubble
Sunday April 3, 2005
The Observer
There has been no spectacle in the history of televised sport as compelling
and atrocious as the night of 29 May 1985, when 39 Italians were killed on
the terraces of the Heysel stadium, Brussels, in the murderous prelude to a
European Cup final.
It should have been a balmy evening of festival and triumph between
Liverpool and Juventus, who were, respectively, then the toughest and most
elegant teams in Europe. Liverpool had won the competition the previous year
in Rome against the home side AS Roma and now stood poised to take their
fifth European Cup.
The Reds had never seemed more imperious. Juventus were perhaps the only
side in Europe who could match them. The team of Zbigniew Boniek, Marco
Tardelli and Michel Platini was hard-tackling but also one of passion and
flair. Platini had vowed to fans to make up for a disappointing season by
inspiring Juve to a historic victory.
The stage was set for a classic confrontation. The game was billed as a
carnival of attacking football. Instead, it was a scene of carnage. Bodies
were piled up at the side of the pitch or just underneath the directors'
box. Throughout the game, they were visible to many fans, including players'
wives. One of the most distressing sights - and certainly one of the most
difficult to forget - was that of a homely, mustachioed Italian fat guy,
sprawled with his dead and dying mates in the rubble on the terracing, his
hand held aloft in a frozen gesture of despair. This was a scene from a war,
not a football match.
Twenty years on this image has lost none of its power to shock. Most
witnesses agree that the violence had started early, around 90 minutes
before the scheduled kick-off. The stadium was buzzing with songs and
skirmishes and an extraordinarily hostile atmosphere between the two sets of
fans. The hostility was explained by some Liverpool fans as payback for the
final in Rome the previous year, when Liverpool had beaten the home side on
penalties. As Liverpool fans had left the stadium after that match they had
been pelted with stones and other missiles by the Roma tifosi. No matter
that Juve fans had little in common with their compatriots: Liverpudlians
were this year in no mood to give ground easily to any Italian fans.
The atmosphere had been noted by the Liverpool players on the pitch before
the game and then as they waited in the dressing room. Alan Hansen, a
veteran of some of the most difficult grounds in Europe, remembers remarking
to left-back Alan Kennedy as they strolled on the pitch that it was the
first time that he had seen supporters taking bricks into a stadium.
'They're not throwing bricks,' replied Kennedy. 'They're throwing the
stadium at us.'
The most important football match in Europe was being staged in a crumbling
ruin. There was already an understandable feeling of unease in the Liverpool
dressing room, the result of manager Joe Fagan announcing his retirement the
day before the game. The Heysel final would be his last match in charge.
Kennedy, whose goals had been crucial to Liverpool's European success, was
out of action that night but travelled with the team to keep up morale. It
was his job to keep visiting the pitch to monitor the situation. Every time
he reported back to his team-mates, the news was worse. As the violence and
the rumours of casualties escalated, Hansen noted how Fagan, whose whole
life until this point had been football, began to resemble 'a broken man'.
The most dangerous area of the stadium, clearly visible to Kennedy from the
players' tunnel, was the so-called Sector Z, where Liverpool and Juventus
supporters stood merely yards apart. They were separated only by a thinly
policed no-man's land and temporary chicken-wire fencing. Most of the
non-Liverpool fans here were in fact neutrals or expatriate Italians and
their children. As the kick-off drew nearer, Liverpool fans began to shower
the 'Italian' fans with beer cans, stones, with whatever came to hand. When
the 'Italians' responded in kind, the enraged Liverpool fans stormed the no
mans' land and the fencing and found, to their surprise, they had free rein.
The fencing was broken down and turned into weapons. The terrified Belgian
and Italian fans had no way out and, in desperate frustration, stampeded
into a perimeter wall. As it collapsed, killing the 39 innocents and maiming
600 more, the world watched in horror as Liverpool fans turned their
attentions to the riot police who were now belatedly entering the stadium.
This was the scene that has entered football history as the 'JFK moment':
when everybody who was watching remembers where they were and how they felt.
Earlier, British viewers had switched on BBC1 to see Terry Wogan joshing
with Bruce Forsyth in the moments before the match was to begin. Suddenly
the mood shifted as a harrowed Jimmy Hill introduced a confusing scene of
Liverpool fans throwing cans and bottles at the police. The voice of
commentator Barry Davies was trembling as he tried to explain with words
that continue to move today: 'There are reports that some fans have been
killed ... others have been injured.'
In the studio, Graeme Souness and Terry Venables struggled even to say
anything at all. As the bodies piled up and the battle raged, I felt, like
most people watching, deep shame and anger. The sense of guilt was personal.
I was a Liverpool fan. I was from the city. I was one of them. I wasn't at
Heysel that night but I had been on my way. I was travelling in France with
a party of Liverpool fans who had been delayed on their way to Brussels. We
ended up in La Guillotière, the immigrant quarter of Lyon, and drank our way
through the afternoon and evening in a bar, which we draped in Liverpool
colours.
As the tragedy unfolded on television we watched with mounting horror as we
recognised the faces, clothes and style of the lads on the rampage. Nobody
could speak. We drank more in the silence. The Arabs in the bar stared at us
hard in our Reds' shirts, with our flags and banners, but said little or
nothing. I remember most of all watching a girl in a blue jumper trying to
climb over the shattered dead bodies, and slipping on the bloody fencing,
falling surely to her death. In the days to follow, the media across Europe
howled with outrage and with one voice at 'English murderers', 'Assassins'
and 'Reds Animals' (this was also a banner produced in the Heysel stadium by
Juve fans).
In France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere they laid the blame at our violent
culture, the legacy of colonialism, the arrogance and stupidity of the
Thatcher government. In Britain itself, the government, the football
authorities, the press and the television were stunned. 'It isn't that we're
numb,' said Margaret Thatcher. 'We're worse than numb.' For once the tabloid
headlines had it right: this was literally, as the Mirror put it, 'the day
the football died'.
In the immediate aftermath, there was widespread anger and confusion. In
Italy, the British embassy and other national interests were attacked.
Across Europe and the world, English working-class males, particularly those
from Liverpool, became a byword for ignorance and savagery. In Britain,
Thatcher cancelled a cabinet meeting and declared war on 'the hooligan
problem' with much the same rhetoric as she had vowed to wipe out the
striking miners' unions.
Within days, Liverpool chairman John Smith announced that the club would be
withdrawing from the following season's Uefa Cup. Within hours of this
announcement, under pressure from Thatcher herself, the Football Association
announced that English clubs would be banned from Europe for a year. This
was still not enough and two days later Uefa, the game's European governing
body, declared that all English clubs were banned from Europe for an
indefinite period. In practice this would be five years.
This punishment was followed by the arrest and deportation of Liverpool
fans, identified in the press and on television, in what was the largest and
most bizarre criminal deportation in British legal history. The Liverpool
Echo assumed the role of guardian of the city's conscience and declared 29
May as the blackest day. It reported that Bill Shankly's widow, Nessie, had
turned off the match to pray for the victims. In the days to come the
letters' page was filled by fans' accounts of the disaster. The predominant
emotion was disgust and self-hate mixed with an urgent desire for expiation.
One lad confessed that he had been part of the charge in 'Sector Z' but had
broken down weeping when he saw what he had done. There was a cover story
about the 'heroic Scouser who saved lives'. In stark contrast, K Martindale
of Mossley Hill wrote to the Echo to say he had seen fans pick-pocketing and
kicking the corpses. On the ferry from Zeebrugge, disgusted and traumatised,
he reported that a grinning lout had boasted: 'We killed forty!'
The truth was that nobody in the city knew how to react. Partly this was
because it was so hard to work out what had happened exactly, especially if
you had actually been there. Fans' stories varied wildly, laying the blame
at, variously, aggressive Juve fans, the cowardly Belgian police, the
decrepit stadium. Like many supporters, Steve Kneale, now working for
Liverpool City Council, knew nothing of the full extent of the tragedy until
he and his mates saw the headlines the following day. 'We were reading the
papers in a hotel and everybody around us - French and Belgians - were all
silent and didn't want to speak to us,' he told me recently in Liverpool.
'I remember one of the lads, an older feller who'd travelled most with
Liverpool, saying quietly that we should just go home. We went out into the
street and this old woman spat at us and started shouting in Flemish.' The
Echo devoted swaths of space to witnesses' accounts reporting that the riot
had been the work of the National Front, Chelsea or Leeds supporters or had
even, as one diehard Red insisted, been provoked by disgruntled Evertonians.
Liberal councillor Peter Millea, who was at the match, told the Echo he
distinctly made out a contingent of skinheads wearing Union Jack T-shirts
and speaking with cockney accents.
'No Scousers dress like that ,' he said, 'and it was clear they had just
come for trouble.' Liverpool chairman Smith issued a statement saying that
the troublemakers were NF supporters, probably from London, and that a shot
had been fired before the worst part of the riot.
Fans desperately wanted to believe that all of this was true. Most of these
rumours have long since been dismissed as fabrications. John Williams, of
the Sir Norman Chester Centre for Football Research at Leicester University,
is however still unsure about what actually took place on the terrace.
Williams is probably the foremost authority on football culture in the
Seventies and Eighties, and is a lifelong Liverpool fan. It was his direct
knowledge of Anfield that made him sceptical then and now about the official
accounts of what happened.
'None of these rumours about National Front supporters was ever proved, or
ever will be proved,' he says, 'and it is true that these urban myths are a
neat way of avoiding reality. But to anybody at the time who knew the
culture of Liverpool FC and its supporters, there was something that rang
false in all the media accounts. The fact remains that Heysel was totally
alien to Liverpool football culture.'
Williams argues that Liverpool terrace culture was at odds with the kind of
hooliganism that blighted the game from the mid-Seventies onwards. 'There
were often fights at matches,' he says , 'but in general Liverpool fans were
not really interested in violence, although they could look after
themselves. The idea of being a "scally" was to be above the kind of
pointless destruction which neanderthals like Leeds or Chelsea or England
fans went in for. That is why Liverpool fans were never organised into
firms; there were just small bunches of mates who stood together at the
match or in the pub. It was okay to steal - as long as what you stole was
designer stuff from Europe or wherever. It was just funny stuff, larking
about.'
A similar ethos was promoted in The End, the most popular Anfield fanzine of
the era. Funnier than Viz and sharper than the Face, it was firmly rooted in
a scally culture of robbing, smoking 'draw' and shagging. The fanzine was
celebrated by John Peel, among others, who wore a The End T-shirt on Top of
the Pops, and in the pages of the NME and Sounds. Its editors (who included
Peter Hooton, who would later find fame with the band the Farm) mocked
'agriculturals' and 'woollybacks' from Manchester and Leeds (the striking
miners were the one exemption to this code on the grounds of their attacks
on the southern establishment).
They laughed long and loudest at Cockneys (and particularly Chelsea fans)
for their stupid accents and lousy clothes. If this was a fiercely parochial
view of the world, it was not especially violent ('All football hooligans
are dickheads,' was a common refrain on the letters' page). The End was, in
its own way, the heir to the irreverent and clever Liverpool tradition of
the 1960s, which produced the Beatles and a whole generation of artists,
comics and writers.
But this was not, by 1985, how the rest of England saw Liverpool . By then,
the city was noted for industrial decline and social unrest. In a country
changing to keep pace with the hucksterism of the Thatcher
counter-revolution, Liverpool, with its unemployment, riots and far-left
politics, seemed a strange and separate place. Peter Hooton was at Heysel.
He is honest enough to concede that Liverpool fans were responsible for what
happened.
'I'd never say they weren't Liverpool fans because they obviously were,' he
says now. 'There was none of this mythical "organisations" from London or
other people.'
The shock of Heysel for Hooton and others was that it confirmed the outside
world's view of Liverpool. Most significantly and damagingly, it revealed a
dark side to the city's culture to those who thought they knew it best. This
is one key reason why Heysel remains largely a taboo subject in Liverpool.
A second is that feelings over Heysel are also related to the Hillsborough
disaster of 1989, when 95 Liverpool fans were crushed to death, with another
dying later. Then, Liverpool fans were the victims. This did not make
Hillsborough any less traumatic, but it did mean that it was easier to come
to terms with. As one witness to both Hillsborough and Heysel put it: 'It is
the difference between a bereavement and a murder.'
One of the most extraordinary and, for many, still shameful facts about
Heysel is that the match actually took place. The accepted truth is to say
that if it hadn't there would have been a bloodbath in the streets. Nobody
can say at this distance whether this would have been the case, but given
the disgracefully bad policing, it may well have happened. Another accepted
truism is to say that when the kick-off took place everybody had forgotten
the football. But this wasn't strictly true, not for thousands of fans in
the stadium, and not where I was standing at the time.
Certainly I was not alone in the crowd of fans in a bar in France in willing
Liverpool to win. We complained loud and long about the phoney penalty,
scored by Michel Platini, which won Juventus the Cup. As the match finished,
a window in the cafe was smashed. We walked out of the bar to face a small
mob of locals. We tore into the pack. We weren't psychopaths or even
normally football hooligans. But we fought as hard we could.
Even 20 years on, I find it hard to explain this. How could anyone justify
more violence in the immediate wake of a televised massacre? The simple
reason is that we refused to be ashamed of who we were. Many of those in
Heysel that night have told me that they felt the same emotion. Guilt was
inextricably linked to defiance, which in turn created more violence. One of
the most penetrating studies of these emotions is to be found in the 1991
book Amongst the Thugs by Bill Buford, which was written explicitly as a
response to Heysel.
Most devastating of all is Buford's firsthand account of the excitement of
terrace violence, the electricity that sweeps through a mob, turning it into
a murder machine. He quotes Susan Sontag and Georges Bataille to explain
that the real attraction of hooliganism is to be found in the 'elation of
transgression', a 'druggy high' when everything is perceived in 'slow motion
and great detail'.
Fascinatingly, Buford - an educated middle-class American, a stranger to
football culture - is drawn in and enjoys the violence he comes to report
on. My own final memories of Heysel are, in the same way, not just shame but
also, at some deep and untouchable level, the exhilaration of combat. All
football fans understand this, viscerally. In Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby puts
it in simple but extremely effective terms:
'The kids' stuff that proved murderous in Brussels belonged firmly and
clearly on a continuum of apparently harmless but obviously threatening acts
- violent chants, wanker signs, the whole, petty hardact works - in which a
very large minority of fans had been indulging for nearly 20 years. In short
Heysel was an organic part of a culture that many of us, myself included,
had contributed towards.'
Heysel has inspired few cultural responses. Liverpool playwrights Willy
Russell and Alan Bleasdale were at their prolific best during this period,
but produced no major work that dealt with the subject. One low-key response
from high culture was 'Memorial' by Michael Nyman. This elegiac piece was
performed once only, in a warehouse in Rouen, days after the disaster. It
was described in the Guardian by Waldemar Januszczak as 'a small piece of
atonement'. It resurfaced as part of the soundtrack to the Peter Greenaway
film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover but has been forgotten or
ignored by those who were at Heysel.
Appropriately, Nyman's work, intended as a homage to the dead, has indeed
had a greater impact in Europe, where one Italian critic described it as an
'inexpressibly sad and epic funeral march'. European commentators on Heysel
have seldom engaged with, let alone understood, the intricacies and nuances
of English football cultures. However, a few recent works have provided
useful insights.
One of the most powerful and moving is a 2003 book from Italy called Le
verità sull'Heysel ('The truths on Heysel') by the veteran sports journalist
Francesco Caremani. This is an attempt to understand the violence from the
point of view of those who are attacked and killed. This does not make it a
book written against Liverpool fans or Liverpool FC, but rather, as Caremani
himself says, 'a book about human motives and suffering'.
Most important, and most bravely for a writer writing from the Italian point
of view, Caremani does not flinch from describing all those present at
Heysel as victims in the sense that they were playing roles in a larger
tragedy that they did and could not understand at the time. This is the
perspective of the French media theorist Jean Baudrillard, who devotes a
chapter in his book The Transparency of Evil to Heysel.
His analysis is uncharacteristically straightforward and clear-eyed. He says
Heysel was a primitive but devastatingly effective form of 'interactive
television'. He points the finger at the Thatcher government's war with the
miners (which he describes as 'state terrorism'), which he says was bound to
lead directly or indirectly to eruptions of violence at sporting
'pseudo-events'.
Heysel, says Baudrillard, did not happen by chance; it was the inevitable
result of the desire of spectators to turn themselves into actors. The
nature of the violence itself - crude, tribal and pointless - was a cultural
reflex conditioned by circumstance and environment. For once Baudrillard is
not overstating the case for effect. It is easy to forget what a violent and
unstable place Britain was in the early 1980s and how poor the conditions
were for football fans during this period.
Since the early 1970s English fans had been wreaking havoc in Europe and, at
home, on each other. Their behaviour was received with platitudes and
inertia from the media and the government. Those who ran the game, those who
could do something about the bad grounds, the lousy security, the climate of
hate and the racism, invariably looked away. Everybody who attended a match
during this period knew that something was deeply wrong.
Heysel changed everything about the culture of English football, much of it
ultimately for the better. Its antithesis was probably Italia 90 when, in a
fog of spliffed-out bliss and to the soundtrack of New Order, English
football began its long renaissance. Since then we've moved on to the age of
the 'post-fan', the age of consumers rather than supporters.
Even so, no one these days can seriously wish for a return to the bad old
days before the Taylor report, the judicial inquiry commissioned in the wake
of Hillsborough that led to widespread reform, including all-seat stadiums
and intelligent policing. And yet there remains a strong sense in Liverpool,
England and Europe that what happened at Heysel is unfinished business.
For a variety of reasons, it has not been quite expunged from memory.
Perhaps it never will be. The hard line of Uefa has had far-reaching
consequences for the game in England and there are still those (such as
Howard Kendall, then manager of Everton, who had won the Cup Winners' Cup
that month and stood poised for the Champions Cup in the following season)
who talk regretfully about lost opportunities and a lost generation of
English players.
They blame Liverpool fans for destroying a whole era in football history and
for ending the dominance of English clubs. The truth is that the collapsed
wall at Heysel was a deadly metaphor for the gathering destructive forces
that brought English football culture to its knees. Most significantly,
Heysel marked the culmination of a long trajectory of violence and neglect
in England's football culture, which, despite the success of its clubs in
Europe, was heading inexorably for self-destruction.
Looking back, it is a miracle that anyone has made it out of the wreckage.
· Andrew Hussey is a contributing editor of Observer Sport Monthly. He is
the author of The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord (Pimlico).
He is writing a history of cultural subversion in Paris to be published in
Penguin in 2006. His interview-profile of Zinedine Zidane was published in
our issue of April 2004
 
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
http://arianna.libero.it/usenet/

> Massi (giallorosso) <<
"atom heart mother"


dico la mia: L'Uefa squalifico' pure lo stadio della Juve per due o tre
turni, obbligandoa giocare a porte chiuse. Questo vuol dire che gli
incidenti provocatori ci siano stati. Inoltre dai filmati che si vedono in
questi giorni ci sono cose innegabili. Ad esempio allo stadio vengono
esibiti striscioni con scritto Reds Animals e non sono stati preparati al
momento ma bensi portati dall'Italia.
Quello che colpisce, comunque, e' vedere per quasi un'ora la gente accalcata
sul muro e nessuno dietro che spinge! Possibile che nessuno abbia pensato di
richiamare la folla indietro?
Questa e' frutto di un'organizzazione pessima. Poche storie. Forse si
potevano salvare tante vite, magari tutte.
Quello che mi scandalizza e' che nessuno dica chiaramente che gli scontri
tra Ultras ha causato la morte di 40 persone innocenti e che quel tipo di
incidenti tra Ultars succede ogni domenica e ogni volta e' una fortuna (solo
fortuna!) che non succeda come in Belgio.
Credo che condannare solo ed esclusivamente una curva sia sbagliato.
E' il genre di tifo che va eliminato. Allo stadio si va per vedere uan
partita enon per combattere contro nemici. Questa e' la mentalita' che deve
essere fatta cambiare.
Ho detto tutto. Quasi tutto. Grazie
Gianluca


 migliore per "andare avanti".
Solitamente non mi addentro nella questione ma dico la mia ragionando in
termini generali e non specifici dell'Heysel.
Io penso che la partita di oggi (e di Torino) sia una giusta occasione per
commemorare, il passato non si dimentica nè va dimenticato (in ogni caso)
ma dal passato bisogna imparare.
Certe tragedie non devono accadere, ora è inutile puntare il dito ma è
utile far capire a bambini e ragazzi che lo sport (il calcio in tal caso)
è e deve essere fratellanza e può essere portatore di veri valori (mi
spiace si sia parlato troppo poco ad es. di ciò che è accaduto a Milano
fra tifosi scozzesi ed italiani con grande amicizia e gesti di solidarietà
degni di nota, su 
interisti.org
 c'è un bel resoconto a tal proposito,
leggetevelo pure).
La partita di stasera sono convinto sarà un'occasione per tutte queste
cose e spero che anche a Torino il clima possa essere sereno per il
ritorno.
-- 
Fabio5 [ICQ 175236943] - Hattrick: Saints Regia (235798) in V.95 Italia
Co-mod di it.sport.calcio.inter e fondatore di it.sport.calcio.estero
Josè Mourinho dopo la sconfitta col Newcastle e prima dell'andata di CL
(persa) col Barcellona: "Chelsea never lose two consecutive matches"

continuano a circolare, solo che ora le dicono pure alcuni italiani.....
Letto? Fans' stories... Le storielle raccontate da un gruppo di
assassini ubriaconi.

 Gianluca
Ciao, Gionni
