How a simple football match ended in horror, scandal and 96 Liverpool FC fans dead. An insider’s story of the tragedy that changed English soccer forever.

By Ryan Dixon

Even with brilliant blue skies overhead, the gathering storm at Hillsborough Stadium was clear to Bruce Grobbelaar. Every time the Liverpool FC goalkeeper went behind his net to retrieve an errant ball during his team’s FA Cup semifinal game with Nottingham Forrest, he heard desperate pleas from Reds supporters fighting for the air in their lungs.

“People were yelling, ‘Bruce, can you please help us, save us? They’re killing us!'” he says. “I’m thinking to myself, Who? I didn’t realize the surge of the people from the back was crushing the people in the front.” Standing Liverpool fans crammed into two crude pens directly behind their team’s goal were scrambling for survival; some tried to scale 10-foot-high fences to freedom, others were being pulled to safety in the first row of balcony seats above. Neither option was available to people pressed against the crush barrier at the front. Unable to move in the compressed mob, the life was being squeezed from their bodies. “You could see the faces being pushed against the meshing,” says Grobbelaar.

At that point, he pleaded with a policewoman to unlatch a gate that granted access to the field, but was told she didn’t have the authority. Minutes passed and the crush worsened. When the small gate was finally opened, people could only slip through one at a time. With fans now streaming onto the pitch, play was suspended. Some players intuitively moved away from the mayhem, but Grobbelaar got involved. Along with teammate Steve Nicol, he began dismantling the triangular advertising boards that lined the field and using the pieces as makeshift stretchers. “That’s what we started doing until we were dragged away by one of the coaches,” he says.

Once in the locker room, Grobbelaar and his teammates were told to stay loose, because despite what had already gone on it seemed the game could yet resume. In the chaos, the teary-eyed Liverpool supporters started coming through the door, talking about seeing dead bodies. First, it was reports of two or three. Then 20 or 30. “It just kept going up,” Grobbelaar says.

By the time the game was cancelled and the Reds were told to go home, it was clear something had gone horribly wrong, but the scale of the tragedy had yet to be revealed. “We had a shower, jumped on the bus and didn’t know the full magnitude until, virtually, we got into Liverpool,” Grobbelaar says. “We kept listening to the radio and the disaster just carried on.”

In the end, 96 Liverpool fans died. And English soccer would never be the same.

April 15, 1989, was just begging for a soccer match. “It was a perfect day,” Grobbelaar says. That was the backdrop as fans who’d made the two-hour drive from Liverpool to Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium began arriving for the 3 p.m. game. It was a familiar voyage for many; the same clubs had played at Hillsborough a year earlier in a Cup semifinal. Liverpool fans were directed toward the Leppings Lane entrance of the stadium, where they could make their way to the standing terraces behind the Reds goal. There were sufficient turnstiles there to handle a steady trickle of people, but not a large mass. In an era when hooliganism was still a prevalent problem, the standing terrace was divided into pens. For years these pens rountinely became densely packed with bodies. “There was a Royal Marine who was six-foot-five and 17 stone [about 240 lb.] and he said [during a game in 1987] he got lifted off his feet, the crush was so bad,” says Mike Nicholson, who’s made a web-based documentary about Hillsborough.

The critical error that separated the fatal 1989 game from other contests occurred when the South Yorkshire Police decided to open Gate C—an exit gate designed to allow large crowds of people to leave the stadium—to alleviate the growing stress around the turnstiles, which were overburdened because barriers regulating the flow of people were not erected that day. For the large numbers of people now using a gaping exit gate as an entrance, the natural course of action was to descend on a tunnel marked “Standing” that led toward the two already-packed central pens. Though massive problems were brewing at the other end of the sloping tunnel, all the arriving fans could see was a glimpse of the sun-splashed goal Grobbelaar was guarding. “It was almost like a moth to a flame,” says Nicholson.

There was talk of delaying kickoff for 15 minutes while things got sorted out, but the game went ahead as planned. Fans streamed in to avoid missing the action, further packing the section. The combined power of the crowd was immense.

Before the match was six minutes old, supporters were spilling onto the field and play was suspended. But the damage was done. Nearly a quarter-century later, the events of the Hillsborough disaster linger on, especially for family and friends of the 96 people who needlessly lost their lives; people who went to watch a soccer game and never came home.

The devastation of the tragedy was immeasurably amplified by an extensive cover-up—complete with doctored statements from police and emergency service workers—that allowed key culprits to escape justice. Most notably, South Yorkshire Police shifted blame for Gate C being opened onto the Liverpool fans themselves, claiming they overran the gate and forced it open. This was the peak era of English soccer hooliganism, and the club had been involved with another serious tragedy in May 1985 during a European Cup match in Belgium. Liverpool supporters charged opposing fans, and during the panic a wall collapsed, killing 39 people who were scrambling over it to escape. Four years later, Reds fans were an easy mark.

Only in September 2012, when the Hillsborough Independent Panel’s findings were released after a three-year investigation, did the world gain a clear picture of what happened that day, 23 years after the fact. The report prompted British Prime Minister David Cameron to stand up in the House of Commons and state he was “profoundly sorry” for what he called the “double injustice” of a preventable tragedy occurring in the first place, then being completely sullied by a shameless cover-up. It also led to the original verdict of “accidental death” being overturned and fresh hearings for all 96 deaths ordered. The Independent Police Complaints Commission is also conducting an ongoing inquiry to revisit questions of accountability.

The original 1989 inquiry produced the Taylor Report, a watershed document that mandated the end of standing terraces and the implementation of all-seater stadiums in English soccer. Never again would fans be crammed together in such dangerous numbers. Hillsborough itself became an all-seater in the early 1990s, and remains home to Sheffield Wednesday FC. But the change had other, unintended effects. Safer venues and increased ticket costs helped shift the culture of stadiums away from masses of young men and toward families. In part because of this fundamental change in how fans watch the game, the hooligan dynamic that dominated the 1980s—the violent culture that created the need to cage fans in the first place—ebbed away.

Given that the events of 25 years ago remain ingrained on Liverpool and its supporters to this day—the team refuses to play on April 15 and annually honours the 96 victims; fans still lobby for “Justice for the 96” and boycott The Sun newspaper, which splashed egregious false reports of Liverpool supporters’ behaviour on the front page—one can imagine how raw the emotions were at the time.

In the days and weeks after the tragedy, Grobbelaar and his teammates tried to offer some measure of comfort by attending numerous funerals and visiting the homes of those who’d lost loved ones. Some cried on their shoulders, others slammed the door in their faces. “‘It was because he wanted to see you that he’s gone,'” Grobbelaar paraphrases. “You’d get that.”

As for his own grief, Grobbelaar was able to confront it years later when he played in Hillsborough for Sheffield Wednesday. On occasion, he would walk around the area where the disaster occurred, looking at the layout and imagining how it all took place. “When there’s nobody in the stadium, you can picture why it happened.”

And even worse, how it all could have been avoided.