Fab1b;1608187 wrote:I am not blaming the fans as a whole, but it is still a small part of the problem. Yes the problem lied with event managment and the police's ability to control (or lack there of) the crowd. However you can't tell me from that footage that people still weren't trying to pile into that pen long after it was filled and that they couldn't see the sea of people in there already? From the gate that opened you still had to walk into the entrance to the pen (standing area), you could have turned left or right to other areas but they all rushed for that specific standing area pen directly behind the goal as that the was "place to be" at the games. Like I said, and they showed it, it happened before minus the tragedy. The fans learned a hard lesson as well but when you say blame the fans all you want, you really don't think they deserve a very small portion of that blame?
#1. Like I said, Liverpool fans were only allowed in the middle pen. They could not go to the other pens. They were blocked by the same gates as the gates in the front.
#2. The were pushed all the way back to the bottleneck opening. The people coming in from the back made it so that the people who had walked in couldnt go backwards, only forwards. The people who rushed in from the opened gate, could not know they were crushing people in the front, as they weren't crushing them in the bottleneck, they just assumed they were pushing forward to get in. This was not the first time that end had been crowded to the point of problems.
I think youre not understanding how english fields (especially ones back then) worked so I'll try to help explain.
I went to a stoke game last year (a ground similar to Hillsborough but without the bottleneck). Unlike a stadium like Ohio stadium, they have these little turnstile rooms t hat you walk through. They're like narrow hallways that have the little turnstiles we see in america. However, theyre all individual rooms to walk through. You couldnt jump them because theyre in little booths.
The problem at the bottleneck area of Hillsborough, and the difference between the Britannia regular entrances (stoke) and this was where Stoke's stadium has a concourse (like Ohio Stadium for example to walk around in, get food, etc). At Hillsborough when you walk in the turnstile from the bottleneck area, you walk through the tunnel straight into the ground. The gate that they let people in, was never supposed to be opened when the pen was filled. The people walking through the turnstiles could not exit and the people who rushed in through the gate (over a thousand according to some estimates) could have never seen (since they still walked through the tunnel) that they were crushing people in the front. They just kept pushing forward assuming that there was just a ton of people and they could walk forward like they were in the bottleneck when they were let in BY COPS. Only once chaos started did they realize they had to leave, and by then there wasnt enough exit space to get them all out and the damage had mostly been done.
Does that make sense? The fans who were already in the stadium, literally had nowhere to go but forward (or for a few, up) because of the fans who went in the side gate + the turnstile rooms. The fans that walked in normally wouldn't have had a problem, because they could have gone back towards the back and exited from the sides but since it was so crowded that people literally could not move backwards (and they were blocked off from the other pens); they were stuck.
That's why you saw people literally being lifted up the stadium and why people got crushed against the gates in the front. Do you think that the fans would have done that if they had any ability to exit from the back or had any idea they were crushing people in the front? No way. Theyre all Liverpool fans, they simply had no idea what they were doing. THAT is on those responsible for fan control and those who designed the way the stadium worked, NOT the fans.