The #LUFC Breakfast Debate (Tuesday 5th April)

milkyboy · Apr 5, 2022

ellandback said: ↑

Twenty Two years on from Istanbul: the night when football became murder for Leeds

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The plaque on the wall by Elland Road’s East Stand says “Never Forgotten” and Leeds United swore themselves to those words. The stadium is stuck in a state of eerie silence but this Sunday it will do what it always does on April 5 by standing in salute to the two who were lost.

Every year, the families of Kevin Speight and Chris Loftus place wreathes at the plaque and go together for a drink, to catch up and reflect. This year is the 20th anniversary of the men’s deaths in Istanbul and many of their relatives carry those events as if they happened yesterday. It is part of Leeds United’s fabric and it will never disappear: the night when football became murder and so many lives were changed.

The passing of time is there in all of them. Speight’s son, George, is no longer the cheeky kid with floppy hair smiling brightly in the photograph of his father he digs out. Loftus’s brother Andy jokes that he had thicker hair back in the day. The security guard who was in Turkey with the club’s players and directors is into his 50s and taking it easy after neck surgery. Peter Ridsdale, the chairman who guided Leeds through the tragedy, is approaching 70. And others, like Eddie Gray and Ian Harte, have moved on with their lives. You ask them one by one if 20 years have helped them process what happened. They all say no.

The setting was Turkey’s biggest city, on the banks of the Bosphorus, and the game was the first leg of a UEFA Cup semi-final. Galatasaray away on April 6, 2000; “a huge occasion for the club in a football sense,” Ridsdale says. By the time the match kicked off, the ramifications of two fatal stabbings the previous evening were rapidly sinking in and for those who were closest to it, the images won’t fade.

This is Istanbul, through their eyes.

The son — George Speight

The Speights were a close family who lived in the Yorkshire village of Farsley, where Kevin Speight was landlord of the Bay Horse pub. He had a passion for Lambretta scooters and spent his spare time fixing old models in his mother’s garden. The story goes that he and his wife Susan got together after he offered her a lift on the back of one. They had been a couple since their teens.

For George, the clearest memories of his dad are few and slightly random. He was seven when Speight died, his sister Holly two. There was the time when he was caught stealing two pounds from the pub till and sent by Speight to sit in the office until Susan came home to read the riot act. There was the time when the pub opened its doors early to allow the locals to catch an early kick-off between Leeds and Manchester United. And there was the time when Speight took him to Elland Road and George, in his infancy, mistakenly cheered when the opposition scored. “It’s funny what sticks in your head,” he says.

George has no recollection of his dad leaving for Istanbul or of him saying goodbye. All he recalls about the incident was being woken up by Susan the following morning and told, as softly as it could be broken, that Speight had died. “We switched on the telly and it was all over the news,” George says. “My mum flicked it straight off again. For me, it didn’t feel real. When you’re seven you can’t process something like that, can you? I’m not sure I’ve even processed it now. Because I was so young and the memories aren’t clear, I get times when I ask myself if it really happened.” Holly, as a two-year-old, was left with no memories at all. “I feel sorry for her,” George says. “She’s struggled with it more than I have because she’s got nothing there. She knows who he was but it’s not the same.”

Speight was with a group of Leeds fans attacked by Turkish locals outside a bar by Istanbul’s Taksim Square, sustaining a slash wound to his stomach. He died in an operating theatre in the early hours of the morning, despite Leeds United paying for blood supplies to be rushed to him. George is aware of some of the details but has tried not to dig too deeply. “I know bits and bats but it doesn’t help me to go over it,” he says. “A lot of what went on I don’t want to know.

“I heard the rumours — that some Leeds fan wiped his arse with a Turkey flag and things like that — but people tell me none of it’s true. I can only go on what my mum said, but my dad was nothing like that. He wasn’t one of them who tried to cause trouble. My mum always says the same: He’d gone out there for the football, nothing else. He just happened to run into some tossers with knives.”

George was so young that the aftermath almost strayed into boyhood adventure. He was showered with stickers and sweets — gifts from friends who lived locally — and Ridsdale, who supported both families throughout, delivered Easter eggs to the house for him and Holly. “The eggs were massive and I was chuffed to bits with mine,” he says. “It sounds daft but I don’t think I knew how to react. When the press came round, me and my cousin would bounce on my bed to try and get in the photos and in the papers. You’re a kid. You don’t get it.”

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George and Holly Speight with Peter Ridsdale after their father’s death

Susan chose not to take the children to Speight’s funeral. George understands why but wishes with hindsight that he had been there. He visited his father’s body in the chapel of rest across the road, bringing pictures he had drawn for him with felt tips. It is 10 years since he last went to the grave. “I prefer to go to the plaque at Elland Road,” he says. “I prefer to remember that way.” George is a regular at Leeds games but until his teens he would wait outside the stadium at the home fixture closest to the April 5 anniversary while a minute’s applause played out. The first time he went inside to be present, he sat with friends and cried.

Association with the tragedy can be difficult. In the case of Loftus’ brother Andy, he prefers not to make a big deal of his surname for fear of the questions that might follow; the feeling of being “always on show”. George is different. “People know me because of my dad,” he says. “I’ll hear them saying, ‘That’s Kevin Speight’s lad’ and I like that. I like that they remember him. It’s a strange thing but it’s important to me. People speak well of him. It makes me proud.” Like his father, George has the nickname Spag.

Ridsdale is someone the Speights hold in high regard. In the weeks after the deaths, he offered them emotional and financial assistance (the family declined to take any money) and would phone Susan regularly to keep in touch. Football and Leeds’s financial collapse made Ridsdale persona non grata at Elland Road but George says his mum’s face lit up when she heard that he was being interviewed for this article. “Without his help, my mum would have been a bit lost,” George says. “You mention him over Farsley way and people respect him. They know what he did for us.”

The chairman — Peter Ridsdale

The images are so vivid in Peter Ridsdale’s mind that he can describe every aspect of the hospital where Speight and Loftus were taken after they were attacked. He can picture the facade as he entered and the floorplan of the area where other injured Leeds fans had congregated; where Speight lay on an operating table, desperate for surgery.

Ridsdale and Leeds’s operations director, David Spencer, were at a floating restaurant on the Bosphorus when they were phoned to tell them trouble in the centre of Istanbul had resulted in at least two fans being hospitalised. Convention required the directors of the clubs involved in a European tie to share a meal with UEFA delegates the night before the game and Galatasaray arranged the gathering, not far from the Kempinski Hotel where Leeds’s players and directors were staying.

Spencer interrupted dinner to advise Ridsdale that they should return to the hotel immediately. Ridsdale agreed to send his wife and other officials back but instructed a car to take him and Spencer to Taksim Hospital. “My instinct was that we had to know what was happening,” Ridsdale says. “We had hundreds of fans in Turkey, some in the air and another plane due to fly the following morning (the morning flight out from Leeds-Bradford Airport was rapidly cancelled). More importantly, we needed to find out what state the two lads were in and whether we could help them.”

At the hospital, Ridsdale encountered “absolute chaos”. Friends and family of Speight and Loftus had congregated there and other Leeds fans were waiting with more minor injuries, some of them slash wounds. Confusion reigned. Loftus had already been pronounced dead and in the melee, hospital staff mistakenly assumed Ridsdale was a relative and took him downstairs to the mortuary.

“I had no idea where we were going or why we were going there,” he says. “When we got to the bottom of the stairs they pulled out a drawer, a bit like a filing cabinet, and Christopher’s body was there. His brother was following behind us and, quite understandably, he lost it. He started shouting for Christopher to wake up. It was a haunting moment then and it haunts me now. There was nothing you could say to him. We were just trying to control the worst situation imaginable.”

Ridsdale was told by staff at the hospital that Speight was in a critical condition and needed an urgent transfusion but that the blood had to be paid for. Several fans offered to foot the bill. Spencer stepped in and paid with his personal credit card. “I don’t want to imply criticism of the hospital for that,” Ridsdale says. “The blood had to be sourced externally and to do that, someone had to pay. That’s just how the system worked. It wasn’t a proper A&E unit. We weren’t talking about Leeds General Infirmary.” Speight’s treatment failed to save him.

At no stage between arriving at the hospital and Leeds playing the first leg against Galatasaray the following night did Ridsdale sleep. Leeds had worries on several fronts: maintaining the safety of other fans in the city, helping the relatives of Speight and Loftus in Turkey and at home, and deciding whether the game at the Ali Sami Yen stadium should even go ahead. At a local police station, at around 4am on April 6, Ridsdale was given a stark message by the UEFA representative who turned up there: play the game, or forfeit it and incur an automatic 3-0 defeat. The police warned a postponement could cause more trouble. The Football Association’s David Davies said playing the game was “the least worst option”. So Leeds did.

“If you ask me now if I made the right or wrong decision by playing it, I still don’t know,” Ridsdale says. “We could only do what we thought was best at that moment.” The journey to the stadium prior to kick-off made him wish he had forfeited it and taken the consequences. “We had a coach for the players and a coach for the directors,” he says. “Galatasaray supporters, despite everything that had gone on, were pelting the buses and trying to smash the windows. The police were doing nothing to stop them. I genuinely feared for our lives. If someone could have shown me those levels of intimidation, I’d have refused to play the game unhesitatingly. No question.”

Ridsdale still struggles to accept Galatasaray’s indifferent reaction to the stabbings. When the Turkish club flew over for the return leg two weeks later, an occasion as venomous and bitter as any Elland Road has hosted, they railed against Ridsdale’s request that their fans be banned from travelling. UEFA, after a week of consideration, agreed with Leeds. Away tickets were limited to 80, which effectively covered only senior Galatasaray officials.

“I don’t think, even to this day, that Galatasaray would see the amount of press coverage or criticism as being fairly labelled against them,” Risdale says. “They felt we were overreacting and on the day of the game in Istanbul there was no attempt to make sure the match passed off safely or securely, not that I could see.

“When they came back to Elland Road they thought our request for no away fans was inappropriate. They thought we were looking for a sporting advantage, which is just incredible. From my point of view I was only interested in getting that game over and done with as safely as possible. The potential for trouble was as high as anything I’d been involved in. It was horrible.

“I’ll be careful here but I have to say that I felt uncomfortable welcoming Galatasaray’s delegates to Elland Road. I didn’t feel that their response was what our response would have been. I make no secret of that.”

Leeds were beaten 2-0 in Istanbul and lost over two legs after a 2-2 draw at home. There is very little about the football which Ridsdale cares to remember and at the Ali Sami Yen, the stadium was so overcrowded that he had Galatasaray fans in front of him “literally sat on my feet.” The next day, he and Leeds’ players and coaching staff reached the airport, climbed on a plane and flew home. “There was a sense of relief to be leaving,” he says, “but I knew that flying out of Istanbul wasn’t the end of it. I knew the ramifications would be life-long.”

The brother — Andy Loftus

Over a coffee in Starbucks, George Speight finds a way to be philosophical about his father’s death. He has a busy job as an electrician and a twinkle in his eye. Life is good.

The shadow of Istanbul is longer for Andy Loftus. We catch up at the cafe in an Asda store near his home in Killingbeck and he speaks bravely but reluctantly; not because he wants to but because he thinks he should, for the sake of his brother Chris’s memory.

Andy is one of six siblings, two sisters and four brothers, and all of the boys — Phil, Chris, Darren and Andy — made the trip to Turkey. In the context of football, that era was phenomenally good: Leeds in Europe and another trip to the continent always waiting around the corner. “You got paid each month and you did this,” Andy says, gesturing as if to push a wad of banknotes into a drawer. Loftus, 35, was a telephone engineer and an easy-going lad. “He liked a drink and a laugh, simple as that,” Andy says. “Obviously he liked his football too. He’d just met a girl. They’d been seeing each other for about six months.”

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Chris Loftus

The cause of the fighting which broke out after dark in Istanbul was a subject of fierce contention in the weeks after the stabbings. Turkish eye-witnesses accused Leeds fans of insulting women, defacing the Turkish flag, urinating in the street and tipping over a car. Leeds supporters who were present denied causing trouble and the UK coroner who presided over the inquest, David Hinchliff, stated in unequivocal terms that Speight and Loftus were the innocent victims of a deliberate ambush. He described the Turkish policing as “diabolical” and “out of control”.

Speight and Loftus were not close friends but knew each other in passing, as travelling football fans do. The Loftuses had travelled to Turkey on the same flight as David O’Leary’s players. Speight arrived soon after and was seen chatting to midfielder Alan Smith as they walked through the breezy foyer at Ataturk Airport. The routine for Andy and others who went abroad with Leeds was always the same: straight to the hotel, straight into town, straight on the beer. It was how away days in Europe played out.

“We’d heard that Istanbul could be a bit dangerous but we never thought anything of it,” Andy says. “You don’t take much notice of what’s said because you’re out there for a beer and a laugh. There were a few Turkish fans outside the bars we started drinking in but we didn’t think much of it. Right up to the attack, I didn’t see any trouble.” Other fans in Istanbul spoke of isolated incidents here and there but nothing serious.

“Even now I get the feeling that people think we started it,” Andy says. “It’s that attitude of, ‘They must have gone looking for it.’ All the stuff about cars being tipped over, us disrespecting their women — if you’d been there, you’d know. It was a load of ****. The police told us themselves that the shoe-shine boys had been trailing us for a while, waiting to see when some of us had split away from the main group.”

Later in the evening, a group of around 20 Leeds supporters broke off and found their way to the Riddim bar near Taksim Square, the huge expanse in the centre of Istanbul which was filled with places to eat and drink. After a while, Andy’s eldest brother Phil complained of feeling ill and the two of them decided to go back to their hotel. Andy’s last memory of Chris is of him rolling his eyes sarcastically and ribbing him for leaving early, in brotherly style. At the hotel, Phil went up to his room. Andy got a pint at the bar.

“I can’t explain it but I got this weird feeling,” he says. “A couple of lads came back to the hotel on their own and when I asked where the rest of them were, they didn’t know. Then a good mate of mine appeared and said there’d been a bit of trouble. But he didn’t make much of it, like it was something of nothing. It didn’t sit right with me. I jumped in a taxi and went back to Taksim Square.”

He has no recollection of how he came to be at Taksim Hospital, only that he found himself there after being told that the fighting had been serious. When he arrived at the hospital, Darren was in a bed with head injuries. Witnesses said he had been bludgeoned by police as he cradled a dying Chris in the street. Another supporter who tried to resuscitate Chris was hit with batons. “The police were knocking everyone about,” says Paul Holmes, a friend of the Loftuses who was in Taksim Square when the violence broke out. “It was completely against your idea of law and order. Everything happened in a flash. One minute you’re coming out of a bar, the next you’ve got people running to attack you. Then you turn around and Kevin and Chris are lying there.”

In the hospital’s waiting area, Andy overheard a voice saying that one of the fatalities was “one of the four brothers”. “It was a lad from Shipley who I knew,” Andy says. “I didn’t catch everything but I heard enough. It triggered something and I ran into the ward. Our Daz was there and he told me the full story. I was totally speechless, totally shocked. Devastated.”

The next 24 hours were a blur. The brothers went to the British Embassy but, in Andy’s words, found them to be “worse than useless”. The friend who arranged their trips abroad organised for them to fly home via Brussels. They phoned their parents back home but the media had already informed them of Chris’s death. When they landed at Leeds-Bradford airport, a Leeds United club car was waiting to pick them up from the runaway, avoiding the cameras waiting inside. “It was weird because when we got in the car, the game (Galatasaray versus Leeds) had just started and was on the radio,” Andy says. “The driver said he’d turn it off but I wanted to listen to it. I don’t know why.”

The bodies were repatriated a few days later, beginning the process of mourning and funerals. Tributes began to cover the gates and the Billy Bremner Statue at Elland Road.

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(Photo: Phil Noble – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)

Holmes says Andy was “the life and soul of the party” before Istanbul but the impact of Chris’s death was severe. Andy was jailed in 2013 for his part in a fight between Leeds and Tottenham Hotspur fans in which a Spurs supporter was knocked unconscious. He sees it now as a necessary shock to the system. After taking stock, he got involved with the cancer charity Candlelighters and helped raise almost £150,000 for local hospital facilities. Leeds Crown Court sentenced him to 12 months.

“I went off the rails,” he says. “I was getting into trouble, drinking and fighting. I got arrested which was a bad thing but also a good thing. My sisters had a word and told me to sort myself out. I went for some counselling and didn’t go through with all of it but the charity work helped.

“It’s 20 years now but I don’t think I’ll ever get over it. I feel everything: anger, sadness. And I still blame myself a lot.”

I say that as someone who was back at his hotel when the stabbings occurred, he would be one of the last people to blame. “Maybe,” he says, and his voice tails off.

The security guard — Kevin Fallows

The first the Leeds players heard of the incident in Taksim Square was when phone calls started reaching them in their hotel. Leeds had taken over an entire corridor at the five-star Kempinski and the squad were in their rooms, ready to sleep ahead of the game the next night.

Kevin Fallows was the club’s head of security and travelled with the players to all their fixtures in Europe. On each trip he would set up a desk in the corridor where the team were staying, a point of contact in case of any problems. Within an hour of the stabbings in central Istanbul, some of David O’Leary’s squad emerged to speak to him.

“They’d turned on their tellies and it was all over the Turkish news,” Fallows says. “The first I knew of it was when they came out to tell me. What they were seeing was pretty graphic so we said to them, ‘Turn the tellies off, go to bed and wait for us to get some proper details.’” The footage was grainy and frightening, capturing a helpless Loftus with bloodstains on his shirt.

Fallows is a security guard with ample experience. A streetwise Mancunian, he has looked after Oasis, Noel Gallagher and Take That and on the morning when we speak he’s at the First Direct Arena in Leeds, organising staff for a gig by The Script. He has never spoken about his memories of Turkey before but, like Andy Loftus, says he wants to reflect 20 years on.

Istanbul was like no other event he has dealt with. “The only thing I could compare it to is the One Love concert in Manchester (held after the terrorist bombing at the Manchester Arena in 2017) and that’s purely because of how difficult the logistics of One Love were,” he says. “One Love was a controlled situation. Bits of Istanbul weren’t in control. For some of it we were relying on the police and the authorities without knowing if they were going to do the right things.” Before England played Turkey in a European Championship qualifier in Istanbul in 2003, England’s staff got in touch with Fallows to ask for logistical advice. “I just said to them, ‘Good luck.’”

Galatasaray’s reputation went before them. Manchester United and Chelsea had contested European ties at the Ali Sami Yen previously and voiced complaints about their treatment, so Fallows increased the size of Leeds’s usual security detail from three to five as a precaution. They had no direct contact with Galatasaray’s security officials but Fallows and Harry Stokoe, Leeds’s stadium manager, were able to visit the Ali Sami Yen the day before the game to map the venue out. “Even then, it was meant to be closed to the press but loads of them were there and they were being really intrusive,” Fallows says. “I tried telling Galatasaray’s staff to get them out. They just looked at me like I was stupid.”

Fallows is convinced that Galatasaray and the Turkish police made deliberate attempts to rattle and unsettle away teams, forcing players to squeeze through tight lines of officers to gain entry to the ground and admitting thousands of home fans to the stadium hours before kick-off. The Ali Sami Yen was in a league of its own in atmosphere terms, aggressive and ferocious for visiting sides.

“A lot of what the police were doing was pure intimidation,” Fallows says. “It was totally deliberate. One of our security lads had to go with the bus to a compound, some sort of a lock-up. I had joked with him and said, ‘At least you’ll be safe.’ He gave me a look and said, ‘Or maybe not.’

‘The attitude as far as I could see was, ‘Let’s intimidate these lads and see what happens.’ Leeds back then had a lot of kids in their squad. That’s what they were, kids. We tried to keep a lot of the information about what had happened [to Speight and Loftus] from them, rightly or wrongly. You were dealing with young lads and the last thing you wanted to do was scare them.”

The morning after Loftus and Speight were killed, Fallows and Stokoe were asked by Ridsdale to visit every hotel where the club’s supporters were staying. Leeds always kept records of who was travelling and which hotels they were using. The pair were met by angry, upset and bewildered groups. They stressed as delicately as they could the importance of staying indoors.

“I could see in their faces how much they were raging,” Fallows says. “I didn’t want to be standing there telling them what to do and I understood that they didn’t want to hear it. My sympathy was with them. But it was common sense. We had to say to them as clearly as we could, ‘If you go into the streets, if you go out drinking, we can’t tell you how dangerous it’ll be. Trust us, this is only going to get worse.’

“It didn’t go down well, and I got that. It was the same at the second leg when I had to stand and look after Galatasaray’s main man at Elland Road. I got a lot of abuse for that and no wonder. I didn’t want to do it either. Looking at it from where the fans were standing, I’d have been as angry as them. But it had to be done.”

In the circumstances, did it surprise Fallows that the game in Istanbul went ahead? “Surprise me? I was amazed,” he says. “Absolutely amazed and totally stunned. Anywhere else in Europe, I doubt it would have been played. I spent the whole night thinking, ‘What are we doing here?’ And when the Leeds fans turned their backs to the pitch, total respect to them because the football meant nothing. Any time I think about what happened, I ask the same question. How can it be that two lads go to watch a football game and don’t come back?”

As kick-off drew near, the drums and the noise from the stadium filtered down to the Ali Sami Yen’s subterranean dressing rooms. The design of the place meant the Leeds players had to take a long walk to the tunnel, flanked by armed police. “Me and the security team tried to create a bit of a cushion between them so the players weren’t worried about getting batoned,” Fallows says. Soon, they arrived at a flight of steps and a spot which would generate one of the lasting images of the entire tragedy.

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Bowyer leads out the Leeds team as the first leg went ahead (Photo: Steve Mitchell/EMPICS via Getty Images)

“I stood there with Eddie Gray,” Fallows says. “We looked up the steps and all you could see at the top was the dark sky and riot shields around the entrance to the pitch. There isn’t much that unnerves me but that was quite a scary moment. I looked at Eddie, he looked at me, we smiled a nervous smile and both said the same thing: ‘Let’s go.’”

The team — Eddie Gray and Ian Harte

Eddie Gray is crouching down as he runs up from underground and into the open air. Harry Kewell is in front of him, carrying a ball and looking bewildered. Another picture, taken by the Yorkshire Evening Post’s Mark Bickerdike, shows Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate stepping from the tunnel with tangible shock on their faces.

Welcome to Hell, Galatasaray liked to say. Those April nights were as close as Leeds will get to it.

Around them, riot police are standing with shields in the air, protecting the players from what Fallows says was “all sorts of things smashing off them”. Gray, one of O’Leary’s assistants, tried to focus his attention elsewhere. “It felt to me like the police were trying to frighten us,” he says. “I don’t know if the club encouraged them to do that but you were well aware of objects hitting the shields. The atmosphere was electric — like, scarily electric. I thought about Graeme Souness running and planting a Galatasaray flag in the middle of the pitch at Fenerbahce. Jesus. He must have been off his head.”

Ian Harte, the left-back, is more vivid in describing it. “It’s the most terrified I’ve ever been,” he says. “Everything about that whole occasion was shocking. The slit-throat gestures from fans as we arrived on the bus. The way the police and the authorities were with us. And that’s without even mentioning what had gone on the night before with the two lads who were killed. I’ll be honest, by the time we were kicking off I had no idea why we were playing. I don’t think a single one of the lads wanted to play that night.”

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(Photo: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

For Leeds’s staff and players, the details of what had occurred in Taksim Square the night before remained sketchy until after full-time. They knew there had been trouble but the club made an effort to hold back some detail on the basis that if the game went ahead, they would need to concentrate on it. Gray remembers O’Leary going out of the team hotel to visit a barber’s for a shave beforehand. Everything was muddled.

“In the first leg it was difficult to say, ‘Let’s get out there do it for the two lads’ because we didn’t have the full picture,” Gray says. “The second leg was totally different. By then, you knew exactly what had gone on and you knew the severity of it. Two lives lost and two lives wasted, for nothing. It sunk in quickly once we got home. A week or so later, we lost 4-0 to Arsenal. Your mind was elsewhere.”

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A minute’s silence is observed before the return leg at Elland Road (Photo: Steve Mitchell/EMPICS via Getty Images)

Harte also felt a delayed reaction. He had been involved in the plane crash which Leeds’ players and coaches escaped from on the way home from a Premier League game at West Ham United in 1998. “For a couple of days afterwards you run on adrenaline,” he says. “Then you get your head around what’s actually happened. I was so pleased to get on the plane out of Turkey but once I got back and thought about things, the reality of two lads dying out there got to me. When the second leg came round, in the dressing room we were trying to say, ‘Come on, let’s get stuck into them.’ But in the back of your mind you’re putting football aside. It’s a game. Who really cares?”

Gray, a Glaswegian, was in the Celtic end with his wife Linda on the day of the Ibrox disaster in 1971. The away crowd emptied after Rangers’ late equaliser without realising what had unfolded inside the ground. It was only when Gray arrived home that his parents asked if he was OK — and told him about the many Rangers fans who had died.

“The Ibrox disaster was a tragedy, an accident,” he says. “No one meant for it to happen. In Turkey, two supporters were murdered. It’s completely different. As a family, I don’t know how you come to terms with that.”

Inside the Ali Sami Yen, hundreds of Leeds’ supporters attended the first leg as planned and were housed in a small section of yellow seats. There was no minute’s silence or acknowledgement of the deaths. Holmes was there and witnessed the entire away end turning their backs to the pitch with arms raised, an act of silent defiance and dissent. “We’d spoken about doing something beforehand,” he says. “It was obvious that Galatasaray were making no concession for what had taken place, so that was our form of protest. It was our way of making sure the cameras and the world took notice of us.”

To this day, it is used as a tribute every time the anniversary comes round.

The road to justice for the Speight and Loftus families was long and demoralising.

The man named as the prime suspect in the killings, a cafe owner named Ali Umit Demir, was arrested by Turkish police within days and he and three other Turks were later convicted in court. Loftus had been stabbed five times and Speight twice. Both had numerous other wounds.

For long periods, none of those found guilty spent time behind bars. Convictions were quashed, appeals were repetitive and it is far from clear how much of their respective sentences were served. Demir lost his last appeal in 2010 and was jailed for six years and eight months. In 2014 he was spoken to by a Turkish website, a free man again. The interview included vague expressions of regret but no apology to Speight and Loftus or their relatives.

The Loftuses fought for justice for as long as they could. “I stopped getting involved eventually,” Andy says. “We tried to raise awareness but it was a farce. The Turkish police didn’t give a **** about us. They didn’t care.”

The Speights were different and left the criminal cases alone. “My mum struggled massively with it all and she still does now,” George says. “She remarried and she’s carried on with her life but it’s still there, every time you come up to my dad’s birthday or the anniversary. I respect the Loftuses for fighting, 100 per cent. My mum just felt she had to move on. Everyone’s different.”

A brass plaque commemorating Speight and Lofus was set into brickwork outside Elland Road in 2001. It is unobtrusive and reads simply: “In memory of Chris Loftus and Kevin Speight who died tragically in Istanbul, April 5th 2000. They will never be forgotten.”

Both families come here each April 5, to lay flowers and let another year pass.

Andy has paid for the plaque to be cleaned a couple of times and it could do with another polish now. But in the light of day, the sun hits it and the sparkle lingers.
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Nice piece. Thanks for posting Matt. Still fckng heartbreaking after all this time.

ellandback · Apr 5, 2022

Infidel said: ↑

That’s the most unbelievable report Ell

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It bought a tear even to my eye

ellandback · Apr 5, 2022

milkyboy said: ↑

Nice piece. Thanks for posting Matt. Still fckng heartbreaking after all this time.
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Head of Leeds security said he "was amazed, Absolutely amazed and totally stunned" that the game went ahead.

Ridsdale made security visit every hotel where Leeds fans had been staying. Nice touch, that!!!!

wakeybreakyheart · Apr 5, 2022

Turkey is not a very nice country way too extreme. I would never wish to visit.

milkyboy · Apr 5, 2022

ellandback said: ↑

Head of Leeds security said he "was amazed, Absolutely amazed and totally stunned" that the game went ahead.

Ridsdale made security visit every hotel where Leeds fans had been staying. Nice touch, that!!!!
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I’m not Ridsdale’s biggest fan, partly the catastrophe of his chairmanship, partly the appalling ego and self promotion that went with it, partly the lack of him taking ownership of the disaster and blame-gaming.

But good to hear the families commenting on his support, and he appears to have handled this episode with a bit of class, so fair play to him, he’s gone up in my estimation (which I’m sure he’s delighted about!)

wakeybreakyheart · Apr 5, 2022

As you hav

milkyboy said: ↑

I’m not Ridsdale’s biggest fan, partly the catastrophe of his chairmanship, partly the appalling ego and self promotion that went with it, partly the lack of him taking ownership of the disaster and blame-gaming.

But good to hear the families commenting on his support, and he appears to have handled this episode with a bit of class, so fair play to him, he’s gone up in my estimation (which I’m sure he’s delighted about!)
Click to expand...

As you have in mine well done 2 star.

milkyboy · Apr 5, 2022

wakeybreakyheart said: ↑

As you have in mine well done 2 star.
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That’s pretty good for you wakey… are you here all week?

The #LUFC Breakfast Debate (Tuesday 5th April)

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The #LUFC Breakfast Debate (Tuesday 5th April)

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