Standing should return to all England’s top flight football grounds including Liverpool’s famous Kop, because it’s safer, a Hillsborough disaster survivor who helped spark a revolution in terrace culture has told i.
Peter Hooton, lead singer of The Farm and a Liverpool fan, was present at the tragedy on 15 April 1989 that led directly to the legal ban on spectators standing in grounds in the top two divisions, still in force today.
He had to watch that day as bodies were pulled from the fatal crush on the Leppings Lane End terrace; 97 fans died.
But now Hooton, a vocal supporter of the Hillsborough Justice Campaign and one of the first fans to give a voice to terrace culture in the 80s – thinks it’s time for a change.
“I’ve always been in favour of safe standing,” he says. “But I put it to the back of my mind because it was so sensitive. The way Hillsborough happened didn’t really have anything to do with standing did it? It was a breakdown of police control.”
He argues the current situation where many fans will stand in seated areas is “unsafe”, and has the bruises and injuries to prove it.
“Seats aren’t designed for mass celebrations are they?” Hooton says. “It’s more dangerous.”
“It wasn’t standing that caused Hillsborough, it was complete incompetence.”
His comments come after the announcement last Monday that legal “safe standing” – with specially designed rail seats giving supporters a choice of sitting or standing – will return to the Premier League for the first time in more than a quarter of a century.
The limited pilot starting in January involves four clubs, plus Cardiff City in the Championship. Liverpool will play in the first top-flight game with legal standing in nearly 30 years when they meet Chelsea, at Stanford Bridge on 2 January.
Liverpool installed nearly 8,000 rail seats in August. But the club has opted not to join the safe standing pilot and Anfield has remained an all-seater stadium with fans told to “remain seated when possible”.
Hooton says the reality is that he has, along with many other Liverpool fans, been standing throughout games since 2007 when the club introduced a “singing section” to the Kop, following fears that its atmosphere had been lost.
But it has happened between seats not designed for standing. “I have got bruises on my knees and shins to testify to that,” Hooton says.
Now he wants the pilot to go further and be introduced to all Premiership grounds with standing officially restored throughout Anfield’s Kop.
“I think it’s inevitable because it’s progress, because it’s safer,” he says.
A poll of nearly 18,000 Liverpool fans carried out by the Spirit of Shankly supporters group in 2017, suggests most agree, with 88 per cent backing the introduction of rail-seating areas in football grounds.
Cardiff City, Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur will be the first football clubs to have licensed ‘safe standing’ under a pilot starting in January
They were also “perceived to have wider, positive effects on spectator behaviour” and were popular with fans “because of the atmosphere that is created”.
It was given the go ahead after a Sports Grounds Safety Authority report concluded that rail seating cut the risk to fans due to goal celebrations and crowd surges.
Hooton fronted The Farm, the Liverpool indie dance band best known for 1990 top five hit “All Together Now”. But as the founder of the original football fanzine The End he arguably had an even more influential role as a pioneer in expressing the vibrant culture that exploded on British football terraces during the 80s.
It was an era that saw a grassroots working-class movement flourish, as terrace fashions – that still influence what we wear today – morphed with bewildering speed and trainer culture first became a thing.
It also saw the beginning of a movement to give those going to the match a voice, as The End helped to inspire a wave of fanzines.
But Hooton thinks something was lost when the post-Hillsborough Taylor report led to all grounds in the top two divisions going all-seater from 1994.
“In ‘94 on the last day of the [Anfield] Kop people realised that it was the end of an era and people were very saddened by it.”
He sees much of the culture that emanated from people watching football as being rooted to standing at games.
“Obviously terrace culture originated from gathering together and singing,” Hooton says. “And you don’t sit down to sing do you? You stand up to sing unless you’re Val Doonican.
“It has been well documented how that singing took off in the 60s, if you see footage of the kop in 1964, singing ‘She loves you’ and ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ and songs like that. It was popular culture.”
And it is those days – when the Kop would move and sway on mass, unencumbered by the crowd control pens introduced to grounds in the 70s – that Hooton points to when discussing the real cause of the Hillsborough disaster.
“We have never thought it was anything to do with standing,” he says. “It was the pens system.
“People had been on the kop for 30, 40 years with massive crowds and there might have been the odd injury but there was no fatalities. It wasn’t standing that caused [Hillsborough] it was complete incompetence.”
He sees much of the culture that emanated from people watching football since the 1960s, as being rooted to standing at games.
He said: “If you see footage of the Kop in 1964, singing ‘She Loves You’ and songs like that, it was popular culture.”
It is those days – when the Kop would move and sway en masse, unencumbered by the crowd control pens introduced to grounds in the 70s – that Hooton points to when discussing the real cause of the Hillsborough disaster.
“People had been on the Kop for 30, 40 years with massive crowds and there might have been the odd injury but there were no fatalities. It wasn’t standing that caused [Hillsborough], it was complete incompetence.”
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3CkU234
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