Heysel wounds fail to heal

• A sombre Michel Platini holds the European Cup for Juventus after their win over Liverpool while 39 fans lay dead and dying. Picture: Getty

It means "friendship" in Italian and five years ago it was designed to broker peace and harmony between two of Europe's greatest football clubs, Liverpool and Juventus, as they met for the first time in two decades, in a Champions League quarter-final.

Many Juventus fans applauded. A significant number, however, turned their backs on the spectacle, refusing to accept the elaborate gesture.

Time has failed to heal the wounds inflicted on the night of 29 May, 1985, when 39 Juventus fans were killed and more than 600 spectators injured in the Heysel stadium disaster in the heart of Brussels.

The exact details and causes of the events that night are unresolved as there was no official inquiry into the disaster. Yet it is clear they revolved around a controversial neutral area inside a dilapidated national stadium to which Italian fans gained access, a hopelessly inadequate chicken wire fence and simmering tension.

Missiles were being hurled by both sets of fans an hour before kick-off but it is not in doubt that Liverpool supporters were responsible for the charge which saw panicking Italian fans retreat, only to be crushed as a wall gave way under the weight of their flight.

After a four-year police investigation and a five-month trial in Belgium, 14 Liverpool fans were given three-year sentences for involuntary manslaughter, half the terms being suspended.

Those are the stark facts but they do not bring home the waste and wretched misery of a night when English football was mired in shame.

For that, listen to Kenny Dalglish, Liverpool's legendary striker and former manager, who admits it was not until the following morning that the Liverpool players realised exactly what had happened inside the stadium.

"We saw the Italian fans crying and they were banging on the side of our bus when we left the hotel," he has recalled. "When we left Brussels, the Italians were angry, understandably so; 39 of their friends had died.

"I remember well one Italian man, who had his face right up against the window where I was sitting. He was crying and screaming. You feel for anybody who loses someone in those circumstances. You go along to watch a game. You don't go along expecting that sort of ending, do you? Football's not that important. No game of football is worth that. Everything else pales into insignificance."

As it was, English football was never to be the same again.

The Bradford fire, which caused 56 deaths just three weeks previously, and the Hillsborough disaster, which claimed the lives of 96 Liverpool fans four years later, led the way for improvements in stadium safety and design and all-seater arenas.

Heysel, by contrast, focused the mind on hooliganism and ways to exclude troublemakers. It was also Heysel which caused all English clubs to be banned from Europe for five years, with Liverpool serving an additional one-year exclusion.

How did it affect the English game? Well, in the eight years before Heysel, English clubs recorded six European Cup victories – three for Liverpool, two for Nottingham Forest and one for Aston Villa.

In the 25 years since, English teams have won the tournament just three times – Manchester United in 1999 and 2008 and Liverpool in 2005.

Of all football's disasters, Heysel leaves the sourest taste. The needless violence, the inadequate stadium, the fact that the match went on when the bodies of so many of those who had entered the turnstiles just minutes before were outside and covered with flags as makeshift shrouds.

The authorities claimed they were afraid of inciting further violence had the match been cancelled, and admittedly such decisions are taken in haste and with the best of intent.

Yet the fact that Michel Platini celebrated his winning penalty and the Juventus players marked their 1-0 victory with the usual frivolous footballing fripperies in the middle of the pitch simply added to the desperate nature of the occasion.

Platini is now the president of UEFA and has always been reluctant to speak about the tragedy, but he did break his silence before the 20th anniversary to explain his feelings.

He said then: "I didn't play football to see 39 people dead in the stadium – this is not my philosophy of football.

"At the beginning we heard there was a problem in the stadium and we knew one or two people had died.

"My father, who was in the stadium, also didn't know what happened. He found out what had happened the day after when he heard the news on the radio. The people watching TV knew more than the people in the stadium.

"I think it was very important to play. If we hadn't played it would have been worse. I am sure it would have been worse – if the people in the stadium, the Italians, had known there were so many dead, they would have sought revenge. It was better that we played.

"It was very difficult when I got back to Turin, it was a difficult period and I returned two days after to the hospital in Brussels to visit Italian people there."

The legacy of Heysel was a sea change in attitudes towards the staging of major football matches across the continent.

The legacy too is that Platini's experience of that sad night means UEFA have a man at the helm who will never be complacent about fans' safety.