Neal Collins says there are lessons to be learnt from Britain in order to avoid a repeat of Wednesday’s disaster
Like a lot of far more talented individuals, I’ve played football at Ellis Park. In front of 101 000 people, or so they reckoned when they counted the receipts.
The same Ellis Park that hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup final. The same Ellis Park that restricts itself to 68 000 for white-dominated rugby crowds but appears to drop all restrictions when the footballers are in. The same Ellis Park that killed 43 football fans last Wednesday night.
The day I played there, back in 1983 in a curtain-raiser to a Kaizer Chiefs vs Orlando Pirates cup final, the rebuilt stadium looked brand new serried ranks of red seats beneath blue skies.
Stevie Wonder was on the newfangled video screen and fans, trying to escape the crush, were scaling the huge barbed-wire-topped fences to find air. When they arrived on the playing field, bloodied and exhausted, they were attacked by security men and their dogs and forcibly removed from the stadium.
Such scenes weren’t rare back then, when the white government considered football a black man’s game unworthy of investment or policing during the apartheid years.
I remember thinking, as a young footballer-cum-journalist, that I should ask the uncomfortable question in print the next morning: why does this all-seater stadium take all these extra people for footie matches but not for rugby?
Do black people have smaller bottoms? Doesn’t safety matter so much when the crowd is derived mainly from the disenfranchised majority? But I didn’t bother.
The day had been a glorious success. Black fans in a white rugby stadium; the sky hadn’t fallen in, nobody had died. So I wrote a glowing report for the Argus group newspapers and the Golden City Press. In time, apartheid went the way of all unjust regimes. The question was forgotten. Until last Wednesday night.
I was reminded of Ellis Park when I first came to Britain, on the run from some handwritten national service call-up to Voortrekkerhoogte’s personnel services division.
Within weeks of my arrival in England we were hit by a series of footballing tragedies: a fire at Bradford’s Valley Parade stadium; a wall collapsing amid fighting at Belgium’s Heysel stadium, where Liverpool were playing Juventus in the European Cup final; and dozens crushed to death against the perimeter fencing at Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium, where Liverpool were playing Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semifinal, 12 years ago last Sunday.
We learnt the lessons in England. We had to. Three tragedies in four years were too much to bear. South Africa appears to ignore them.
While across the city the 80 000-capacity FNB stadium stood empty, the latest clash between Pirates and Chiefs appeared to draw a crowd of about 120000 to the 60 000-capacity Ellis Park.
I guess it’s a hangover from the apartheid years that the police didn’t have a sufficient presence at football games in South Africa.
In the old days having the police in attendance at a soccer match meant real trouble.The teenaged South African Police national servicemen only turned up to spray tear gas at drum majorettes and generally add to the mayhem. And there was plenty of that. In the early 1980s I witnessed African football at its best and its worst.
There was talent in the townships like you wouldn’t believe, players who could work Brazilian magic with the ball, but there were riots real gun-toting riots to contend with, too.
And despite South Africa’s brave attempts to host the 2006 World Cup (and the continuing promise of the 2010 finals) it appears that even under the new democratic government they have failed to solve the prob-lems that beset football in Africa.
It’s unfair to compare South African soccer with rugby and cricket; years of under-investment and frustration lie behind the scenes, hard to unravel and difficult to understand unless you’ve seen it first hand.
I can remember the fences falling and dozens lying injured at Glebelands in Umlazi; the referee being beaten to within an inch of his life while I stood frozen in fear at King’s Park in Durban; another official being stabbed by a three-foot sword-like panga at, yes, Ellis Park in Johannesburg.
Never once, through countless incidents, did anyone lay a finger on me, a British-born journalist who bothered to play the game and write about township life.
But I thought that, since 1991 when 40 died in Orkney at a Chiefs vs Pirates friendly, things had got better. Crowds are down and the best players Lucas Radebe, Mark Fish, Shaun Bartlett, Philemon Masinga and Benni McCarthy strut their stuff beyond South African shores.
I thought the days of South African lives being wasted at football games were behind us. Until last Wednesday night.
But if there’s one positive that can be drawn from such a tragedy, it’s the lessons we in England learnt from these disasters. Send your football chiefs over here. Fast.
In England they very rarely sell tickets at the gate for big games anymore. To watch Arsenal, Spurs, Manchester United, Liverpool or Chelsea is nearly impossible unless you are a season ticket holder. If there are any spaces they go to “club members” who pay 250 a year and have a special phone line they can call for tickets.
Then, and only then, ordinary members of the public can call and ask for tickets. Even then you are often asked a question like: “Who is Arsenal’s left back?” to check that you are indeed an Arsenal fan and can sit in the Arsenal seats. You can, for a huge fee, watch in the hospitality seats, by calling major ticket dealers.
A couple of weeks ago my son and I went and sat in the Coventry area at Highfield Road to watch Arsenal beat Coventry 1-0. The only tickets available to watch Arsenal or any of the big clubs is at away games. We sneaked in, but the gateman immediately realised what we were doing and warned us to “behave or else”. If we had been two adults he would have thrown us out.
Outside the grounds, you do occasionally get “touts” who sell tickets at way above face value to tourists. But there is never a build-up of fans outside grounds, not since Hillsborough anyway. The idea of 15000 people milling around and being allowed in without tickets is just not on here.
For all this, you can thank a chap called Lord Justice Taylor. He was the guy we got in to solve the problems that beset football in the late 1980s. His subsequent (and superb) 1989 Taylor report basically ensured:
1: No standing terraces at any grounds. At great cost, all Premiership grounds are now all-seater they were given five years to get their stadiums right or face closure.
2: No fencing at all. Wembley uses weird things like clothes lines to stop people getting on the ground, otherwise there are only perimeter boards. And large numbers of stewards.
3: Access improvements in and out including free ways on to the pitch to avoid crushing.
4: General improvement of all facilities, including such apparently unconnected matters as toilets, restaurants and restrictions on alcohol.
5: Comprehensive CCTV coverage of all grounds.
It’s worth mentioning the role of the police here, too. Mounted police on horseback feature at every game. Huge numbers of police operate around and inside the grounds. Racist chanting, swearing and gesturing result in expulsion from the ground with police and stewards cooperating.
It isn’t perfect. We still have the odd incident. But if you remember, Bradford (a fire in an old, rundown ground killed 57), Heysel (49 dead when a wall collapsed in Belgium at the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus) and Hillsborough (97 deaths when hundreds of late arriving fans rushed to get into the ground) left hundreds of fans dead within the space of four years. That will never happen again. Or will it?
I lived in South Africa from 1970 (as a 10-year-old) to 1985 (when I left after multiple problems with tear-gassing policemen) and it worries me that football doesn’t appear to have moved on.
Back in 1983 the gatemen were in chaos and people were climbing the barbed wire fences to get out it was terrible. Nearly 20 years later, things remain the same. Why?
Surely enough money has come into the game (from tickets, television, sponsorship and transfers of big-name players to Europe) for the authorities to pay for proper ticketing and gate stewarding. That’s what I thought. Until last Wednesday night.
I sifted through the pictures from Hillsborough after that disaster, 12 years ago last Sunday. Hardened Fleet Street hacks were in tears.
On Friday we had to sift through the pictures from Johannesburg. Sometimes when you look at pictures of foreign suffering you feel somehow detached, living on the end of a computer screen in London. Not this time.
There’s a lad about the same age as my own son, crying his eyes out. The caption reads: “A young boy cries in the aftermath of the stampede which claimed the life of an adult, presumably his father.”
Then you scroll through computerised hell. Dozens of pictures of dead football fans; rows of them. Some in club colours, some in body bags. In the background? Bent barriers and spikey red fences, a hangover from Hillsborough. Didn’t we tell the rest of the world about fences? No, it appears to have slipped our minds. Until last Wednesday night.
Matshelane Mamabolo, a Johannesburg football journalist, went to the hastily assembled press conference on Thursday and told me: “It was typical. The officials said they could say nothing until the inquiry. Already they were looking to pass the buck, everyone was blaming each other.”
This will continue, mate. Here, the police took most of the blame for Hillsborough (though it was never proven in court) because a door was allegedly opened to allow latecomers to flood in too fast.
In recent months a policeman has been compensated 300 000 for the trauma of that April afternoon 12 years ago; a nurse has been compensated for having to put up with those scenes too, more than a decade later.
The victims, of course, received far too little. For losing their life when they went to watch football. Expect similar problems in South Africa.
I bet you thought you were immune from all this. Until last Wednesday night.
This is normally the stage when journalists begin to find scape- goats for such loss of life. When writers, armed only with a pen, fearlessly point the finger of blame at those who failed the people. But I can find no great conclusions in this senseless tragedy. No great moral crusade to be led. I just hope that lessons can be learned from our Taylor report.
I wish I’d seen it coming. Looking at the pictures, watching the scenes from the mortuary on television, sitting up all night. Considering what might have happened if I’d asked my questions more stridently all those years ago.
It’s been a nasty week.
I couldn’t let the moment pass without saying something. Anything. Nelson Mandela, the Rainbow Nation’s great hope, says it better than me: “This incident should not divide us but rather bring us closer to ensure this horror story does not repeat itself.”
Amen.