I was there with my 13 year old brother. We were slightly to the edge of the worst of the crushing having got to the ground early enough to have got into the stadium about half an hour before kick off. It was pretty crowded then but not necessarily worse than The Shelf on a really big game. However, it just got worse and worse until you could hear people shouting and crying out which I'd never heard before (or since). In other really big crowds there would be waves of movement and crushing that were then relieved. I just recall it getting worse and worse without any relief. I became separated from my brother, although I could see him there was no chance of reaching him. More and more people seemed to be feeding into the stand and if some hadn't climbed the fences and others been let out of the gates then I think there would have been deaths that day.
The thing I could never understand was that the game went on throughout what was such a dangerous occurrence. Now it would stop instantly for the slightest problem.
I'll never forget watching on TV in '89. Instantly, I knew what had happened as it was almost identical to '81. How '81 became the forgotten fore-runner I have never understood. The similarities are so striking that only the most corrupt and biased of individuals can have preferred establishment view that it was the fault of the Liverpool supporters in '89, rather than a repeat of the previous mistakes. I rang the BBC and LBC in the days after '89 to try and put forward the obvious (to me) view that this was a catastrophically negligent failure to learn from our experience but nobody rang me back. I never understood how the lies could withstand even the most basic of scrutiny. If you see film of the two events you know it's a repeat of the same circumstances, however, nobody in the media ever mentioned '81 as if it had never happened. I thank my lucky stars I was there for the earlier event because if it had been us there in '89 then the bodies would have been from our support, of that I have no doubt.
