Documentary Review of Hillsborough | 30 For 30 ESPN

I'm not from Liverpool. But I think that everyone, in their teens, goes for the bright shining stars, especially if their home team requires more of steadfast loyalty than shared glory.

During the second half of the 1980s, I was football mad, and that meant in love with all things Liverpool F.C. The photograph shows me in autumn 1988, outside Anfield - the home of Liverpool Football Club - grinning like a loon, because this was sacred ground.

By then I'd been a Liverpool fan for three or four years. I could name every fact about every player, especially my favorite Paul Walsh. (I played football too. I wanted to BE Paul Walsh.)

I remember Graeme Souness on that pitch, and Kenny Dalglish running on as a player-manager. I have a vivid memory of cringing as Jim Beglin broke his leg.

I recall Heysel, and Liverpool achieving the Double.  I can still feel how it was to be watching with wide eyes and no nails left, as that ridiculously tense final game of the 1988-89 season played out between Liverpool and Arsenal. This was MY Liverpool era and I tried to see them play as often as I could.

On April 15th 1989, I was pretty upset. My last hope of getting tickets to see the FA Cup semi-final match, between my beloved Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, had just fallen through.

The day before, we were going. Absolutely, definitely going. I'd left school bouncing around like a lunatic, telling all and sundry that I was going to Hillsborough. Half an hour later, nearly home, the situation changed.

My friend's uncle had given the tickets to someone else instead.

Back and forth it went, all through the evening and early the next morning, until it was too late to travel to Yorkshire, even if those tickets had materialized.

So yes, on the morning of April 15th 1989, I was upset.  By late afternoon, for entirely different reasons, I was devastated.

I've grown up.  I'll always have a soft spot for Liverpool F.C., but age brought renewed priorities and a lessening of the need to only back the winners.

I consider myself a supporter of my local team these days, but Liverpool is still there in the background.

Moreover, my ties to the city and its people have remained strong. I have Scouse friends, thus I still appear on Merseyside every other month or so.

I tell you all of this not because it's particularly relevant to the Hillsborough story, but it underscores that I've followed the chronicle of the aftermath - on a deep and personal basis - for the past twenty-five years.

Which makes it all the more surprising that the ESPN 30 for 30 Hillsborough documentary could tell me anything new. It did. In abundance.

There was CCTV footage which has been released for the first time. People, who have never spoken publicly about what they witnessed and experienced that day, tell their stories to camera here. We see events unfold practically in real time, with analyses at every juncture.

I did not know what went on behind the scenes with the families, in the Boy's Club across the road and the makeshift mortuary inside the Sheffield Wednesday gym.  I knew all about the dodgy decisions made by the coroner, but not the absolute disdain in which mothers, fathers, siblings, sons, daughters and friends were held. Not afterwards - that story is well known - but right there at the beginning, in the early hours of the next day.

There is a deep anger which comes, when you hear a mother recount how she was told that she may not touch her son. His body was the property of the coroner. "I brought him into this world. I just wanted to hug him." Doreen spoke starkly to the camera. I just wanted to reach through time and shake someone, until she got what she wanted.

Make no mistake. ESPN's Hillsborough Disaster film is hard-hitting and comprehensively factual, but it will also touch on an emotional level. There are segments which will break your heart. Yet others which will infuriate you, and more that will render you proud of humanity.

There are villains aplenty in the Hillsborough story. But there are heroes too.

I've watched a great many news clips, TV specials, movies and documentaries about the Hillsborough disaster in the past. This one is the best telling that I've yet encountered.

If you're not a football fan, then it might be tempting to think that Hillsborough isn't a narrative to interest you. You'd be wrong.

It's a story that begins in a sporting stadium. It affected sports fans. But it's not about sport.

Beyond the disaster itself, and all that tells about gathering for a big event, crowd control failure and survival - or death - in desperate circumstances, it's a tale about truth.

The first lie was told by the police chief in charge while people were still dying just feet away. Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield was visited by the head of the Football Association. With the two men standing in the police control box, overlooking Leppings Lane terrace where that deadly crush was occurring, Duckenfield panicked. Or attempted to cover his back. Or embarked upon a premeditated and cynical attempt to deflect the blame.

"Liverpool fans rushed the gate!" The Chief Superintendent claimed. It was a brazen falsehood. He personally had given the order to open Gate C, with no officers present to barricade the already too full central pens. His decision ultimately led to ninety-six deaths and hundreds of injuries.

Plus the knock-on effect. Those who committed suicide in the decades that followed, unable to cope with their memories.

Once the lie was out, it was compounded in the hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades to follow.  Politicians, including Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, repeated it in all apparent sincerity, before the press, the Commons and various inquiry boards. Over 1300 police statements were altered by their superiors, sanitized into telling a different story, one which blamed the fans.

Selective and/or misleading evidence was presented at the Inquest, which had set out to establish blame upon alcohol, and drunken Liverpudlians, even if the 'proof' had to be manufactured.

Newspaper headlines blazed lies and repeated them endlessly, as if that made it all somehow the truth. When eye-witness reports, or even official verdicts which didn't toe the party line, contradicted the make believe, then the victims were vilified or the witness had their reputation ruined.

It was self-pity, according to those editors, which caused Merseyside to keep harping on and on about a whitewash. Scousers should accept things and shut up. But Liverpool refused to do that and eventually, twenty-two years later, the actual truth came tumbling out.

When Andy Burnham MP stood in Anfield, during the 20th Anniversary Memorial of Hillsborough, it felt like yet another politician delivering empty promises to disguise a whitewash.

Liverpool's supporters had enough of that. Their chant of Justice for the 96 was heart-felt and furious. Burnham represented the establishment, which had closed ranks against a whole section of society. Which had protected itself, even if it that meant perpetuating lies through all official channels.

A sea change occurred after that. Andy Burnham was one of the major players in forcing a deeper review. Two years later, buried documents and altered statements suddenly resurfaced.

Hillsborough is a narrative about the 'little people' uniting against the powers that be. It's a tale of how those who govern, or ostensibly are there to protect and/or represent us, don't always have our best interests at heart. (The final inquiry recorded that 41 of the 96 victims could have been saved, if police and ambulance services had approached this as a disaster, not a mass criminal action.)

Moreover, it tells of how the truth isn't necessarily what's printed in the newspaper, spoken on the lips of world leaders nor uttered by authority figures. And that's a universal tale above and beyond the sporting environment.

But best of all, Hillsborough is a chronicle of Truth Against the World. Of persistence, even when every opinion that is supposed to matter is leveling every weapon in its arsenal against you. Ridicule; scorn; blatant brazen lies published on official letterheads with a stamp; repetition of the same in blazing publicity; judges, coroners, police chiefs and all being so patronizing as they closed ranks.

Yet the Hillsborough campaigners won. The truth came out. That is the lesson for us all.

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