Oh, No, He's Talking About Hillsborough Again, Say The People Who Trot Out The Slurs Every Time Liverpool Win

Yes, Hillsborough trends on social media on a weekly basis. It's not us who are bringing it up. What a ******* country

“April is the cruellest month,” is the opening line of T.S Eliot’s magnificent, epic work, The Waste Land. It is perhaps the greatest poem of the 20^th century and the product of a disturbed mind. Its imagery ranges from mundane to apocalyptic. 

The phrase took on a new resonance for me in 1989. The cruelty of April 15 ended 97 lives and affected the future of thousands of others who survived and witnessed the carnage. The unlawful killings at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest made Hillsborough one of the most recognisable words in the British vocabulary, a stadium name that came to instantly conjure up the ugliest of images.  

For the group of predominantly Liverpool fans who lived through the experience, April came to be painful. The run-up to the anniversary is a time of flashbacks and agonising reminiscence. The bright but still sharp days of early spring should bring the promise of better days after the winter. For those who endured the horror of the Leppings Lane, there is little sunny optimism at this time of year. “It was like this,” is the thought that runs through your head on a crisp, blue-skied morning.

April was the cruellest month. No longer. For many years it was possible to hide from the memories, or at least push them to the back of the mind for most of the other 11 months. Not any more. The bantification of Hillsborough makes it a year-round ordeal. 

Bantification is the wrong word. It would be more appropriate to attribute this development to a meanness of spirit that is coursing through British life. Football crowds have always been a good barometer of society. For now, the needle is stuck on ‘rancid’.     

“Always the victims,” a snide reference to Hillsborough that carries enough ambiguity to allow disingenuous deniability, is sung at a majority of grounds where Liverpool play. The phrase is casually tossed around on social media by supporters of clubs from Portsmouth to Newcastle. This week, a West Ham fan account, arguing about transfer spending, ended the post with the taunt.  

It’s a strange accusation, anyway. Victim has a number of meanings but, in this sense, it is used to signify an unwarranted, perpetual sense of grievance. It implies self-pity, its twin cliche.  

The fight for justice over Hillsborough – a justice that will never be attained – is the opposite. The 35-year struggle has been characterised by a refusal to be victimised. It is resistance more than victimhood.

The entire weight of the British establishment sought to create a narrative where football supporters were blamed for the failures of the authorities, in particular the South Yorkshire police. The refusal to accept the official lies – and, let’s get this straight, the public servants we should be able to trust knew they were lying – should make those who fight for justice national heroes instead of being sneered at and abused. Try transposing ‘Always the victims’ on to the subpostmasters, whose treatment by the Post Office has caused outrage in recent months. Ludicrous, eh? 

But this is football, a game that makes people irrational. It has reached a point over the past few weeks where a Liverpool victory sets Hillsborough trending on social media. The smart money says it will happen again over the weekend, whatever the result of the game against Manchester City. 

Chelsea supporters have a long record of Hillsborough denial. They disrupted a minute’s silence at the FA Cup semi-final 14 years ago. No one was shocked when tragedy chanting took place at the Carabao Cup final last month. After the game, there were sporadic “Murderers” shouts and the odd “You killed your own fans” outbursts. It’s a strange way of consoling yourself after a defeat but hardly unexpected. 

Then came Nottingham Forest and another late goal for Liverpool. The general outcry of rage about the referee making the wrong decision two minutes before Forest conceded made it appear that it was an incident on par with Diego Maradona’s Hand of God goal (which, incidentally, had Forest involvement through that well known Brexiteer Peter Shilton).  

The fury of Forest fans held no bounds. The irrationality was turned up a notch. 

There is a strange and disturbing relationship between Liverpool and Forest, who, of course, were the opposition at Hillsborough. The majority of the east Midlanders were on the Spion Kop and many could not understand what was going on at the far end of the ground. 

Some still don’t. 

There were other Forest supporters who were much nearer. Some in the south stand had a close-up view of the Leppings Lane. One, a trainee doctor, realised what was happening and tried to get on to the pitch to help the injured and dying. He was beaten back by police. This experience had a huge impact on his life. Trauma and guilt haunt him.  

Is it survivor’s guilt that makes so many Forest fans the most vehement of Hillsborough deniers? At the longest inquests in British history – a legal process which completely vindicated Liverpool supporters – some of the testimony from them verged on the surreal. One witness submitted a questionnaire saying: “I believe that the cause of this tragedy was due to drunken Liverpool supporters forcing their way in.” 

He was asked under cross-examination whether he had been anywhere near the Leppings Lane. No, he answered. The one thing the South Yorkshire Police did well was segregation. After all, that's why Forest, with a smaller body of support, had the bigger Kop and a larger allocation of tickets. It was easier to funnel supporters from the motorways to their respective ends.

How, then, did the Forest fan at the inquest form this opinion? The answer was one of the most instructive of the entire two-year process. “Well,” he replied, “I suppose it was what I’d heard in the press and on TV.” 

The mention of the media brings to mind Kelvin MacKenzie and The Sun and the toxic headlines that formed the founding lies about Hillsborough. It is worth noting the role of another darling of the press in spreading the untruths. 

Brian Clough, the Forest manager, was an iconic figure in the 1970s and 80s. He is arguably the greatest of all English managers. He guided the team to promotion and, in their first season back in the top flight, Forest won the title, deposing Liverpool. 

The following season, he led the East Midlands side to the first of two successive European Cups, knocking Liverpool out along the way. The two teams conducted a series of titanic showdowns throughout the late 1970s until Forest fizzled out.  

Clough was a self-proclaimed working-class hero; a socialist who hobnobbed with Arthur Scargill and an individual who prided himself on being a controversial, blunt-speaking northerner. He was also, by the time of Hillsborough, a fading force and a raging alcoholic. 

For someone who portrayed himself as a radical, there was something deeply conservative about Clough. One could imagine him as a Brexit voter; he was not fond of foreigners. In the same season as Hillsborough, he was handed down a touchline ban for punching Forest supporters who invaded the pitch to celebrate a League Cup victory over Derby County, their bitter rivals. The man-of-the-people image was an illusion.

The Forest manager was never near the Leppings Lane end. It did not stop him having strong opinions about the situation. “I will always remain convinced that those Liverpool fans who died were killed by Liverpool people,” he wrote in his much-publicised autobiography in 1994. He went further on the BBC’s Clive Anderson chat show. 

“They were drunk. They killed their own,” he told Anderson. You could probably turn that into a song.

No one did more to promote the police’s version of events than Clough. Eventually, he recanted after FourFourTwo magazine, who had signed him as a star columnist, realised they were facing a boycott. Few people believe his u-turn was driven by conscience. 

David Duckenfield, the match commander at Hillsborough and the man who made the fateful decisions that led to the deaths of 97 people, told the inquest that he remembers going to a pre-match briefing at 10am and then nothing until 2pm. There has never been definitive evidence about Duckenfield’s movements but most Hillsborough campaigners believe that the senior policemen spent at least some of the time drinking with Clough in a hospitality suite.  

The man who brought two European Cups to the City Ground is a hero in Nottingham. His word is gospel to some. Even about Hillsborough.  

In the past few years, a Forest supporters’ group have worked hard to educate their fanbase and have reached out to their Liverpool counterparts. They are embarrassed by the lingering hostility and denial among Forest fans. This has been a positive development. 

Yet still the insults come and social media trends feature Hillsborough almost every time Liverpool win. A section of City’s support have joined the worst offenders. Moments before I began this sentence, a Citysplainer sent me this message on social media. “It’s not a Hillsborough slur Tony. Stop trying to play the victims.” An Everton supporter (Dad, Scouser, Evertonian says his X bio) agreed. 

Stop trying to play the victims, the say, while the abuse, denial and sneering is amplified by the hour. April’s just one of the cruellest months these days. The football season’s full of them. I don’t expect it to get any better.