The9

Spot on, and everything that happened AFTER the subs showed that it wasn't just the 3 who went off who were knackered.

Sensible Soccer (and SWOS) and Football Manager, Match Day and Match Day 2, ISS Pro Evo, PES, Winning Eleven, FIFA, Kick Off, Kick Off 2 and Player Manager for starters. Super Soccer on the Speccy. Tried to be Match Day 3 but didn't really work, pitch was huge and the power bar didn't quite make for the gameplay you'd hope for. Kick Off 2 Extra Time, and add on disks "The Final Whistle" (awesome potentially freaky wind, more pitch types etc) were both great but the "European Cups" thing (Giants of Europe and Return to Europe, apparently) - was KO2 but with weird badly wrong away goals rule. Good selection of teams though. Footballer of the Year by Gremlin... The Official FA Cup game - play as any of the 130-ish teams including some token non-League ones. Must have come out around 1987/88 as Newport County were still on it. A completely tedious "Cup draw and random results generator" game which trudged through every single round and every single draw and every single result via vidiprinter until someone won the cup. Took hours, no vague clue why or how results were calculated either, but there was clearly some kind of ranking involved along with a random element (see "questions" below). Yoinks, not the best. So, now you'll have to be creative in your memories... Go.

Careful with what you upload, the standard ICS update for my S2 absolutely ripped the guts out of how I'd configged my phone and replaced it with a load of shiiite and a silent vibrate option. Personally I preferred STILL HAVING FLASH.

Cheeky fecker. I should point out that 2/3rds of us have iPhones though Ess !

If you're an ST holder you won't get any more points for buying additional home tickets. We managed to get Everton tickets this morning anyway. Hooray.

Nine previous Saints shirts, still all at bargain prices, none of them are up to more than £6.50 at the moment. Bargains to be had but under 24 hours before most of the auctions close. Slap in a bid, you might get a Saints shirt for £4.99 (plus P&P).

Oh and that as well. If you're going to entice the reader in, don't put 90% of the bladdy text in the original page !

Shall I guess at... Arsenal away ?

You have to wonder whether the excesses of the left like militant left-wing Liverpool councillor and future MP Derek Hatton, the type of underclass behaviour stereotyped in Bleasdale and Lane's tv programmes and other such "scouse" imagery helped make it easier for the whitewash to occur, whether that was due to the polar opposites represented by the new right giving them the impression (to themselves) of occupying the moral high ground, or just due to the public perception of Merseyside from many of the 1980s media images of Liverpool ? There's a lot of power in government control of the media...

There was the obvious pro-Tory angle to the Sun's story too, with the thankfully now-antiquated (bubble aside?) ways of dealing with football fans as potentially violent criminals having pervaded all of Thatcher's policies to address football hooliganism, this was basically the Sun parroting the party line. With The Sun the most populist of Rupert Murdoch's News International group, and the relatively recent at the time (1986, see below) anti-union moves by Murdoch in moving the papers to Wapping, the editorials in his papers were vehemently in line with Thatcher at the time. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/15/newsid_3455000/3455083.stm

Talk about blinkered. I should think a report which supports natural justice and transparency and is critical of poor police decision making (and then implicitly supportive of GOOD police decision-making) would be applauded by the police and lead to better relationships with the public. It's precisely the "close ranks and develop siege mentality, protect ourselves at all costs" thinking that's being displayed there which is what is being undone by yesterday's findings.

Oh, and a couple more from that article, for Frank's Cousin : "Sheffield Wednesday officials seemed to believe that, in an emergency, it would be possible to evacuate a large number of people thorough a tiny gate in the perimeter fencing." "The same people who indignantly call for the fences to be torn down now are the same ones who demanded that they should be put up in the first place." "Thanks were duly said for there not having been any perimeter fences at Bradford, but no long-term lessons were learned from that fire." There were always other solutions to the problems, Ken Bates' electric fences were not allowed, so there was at least some element of humanity attributed to football fans even then, but understandably, it took this disaster to change attitudes on all sides - and despite the best efforts of the fanzine culture and WSC, to some extent it had to be the voices of "normal", non-football people, in this case the victims' families, to speak up in order to avoid just another whitewash and nothing changing, still.

That and the prophesy, in 1989 no less that This one is the argument against all-seaters, which is the only bit of the Taylor Report I didn't agree with - clubs reduced the capacity of standing areas, made matches all ticket, and nothing further happened before all seaters came in. As we all know, it wasn't standing that was dangerous, it was unrestricted, unsafe standing on crumbling overcrowded terraces with nothing to slow the flow of surges and nowhere to go when they happened. Between Hillsborough and the all ticket, all seater, edict being enforced, clubs showed that safe standing was perfectly possible - and then removed it anyway. One thing that's never been discussed is the impact of banning drinking in football grounds (then amended to "within sight of the pitch"), which (admittedly along with the absence of alcohol provision altogether in some grounds) is one of the factors that led to people staying away from the venues until late, to drink elsewhere. It could be argued that that piece of hooligan control Thatcher Government legislation from the mid-80s was also a contributory factor in the background. No alcohol ban, far fewer fans outside immediately before kick off having been to the pub.

"Ultimately, what happens to us doesn't matter. It is our own fault for being football fans", from the article above pretty much sums it all up for me.

Good article from WSC in the immediate aftermath here - the front page was pretty much going against the majority of reporting at the time as well, albeit with it's usual tongue-in-cheek tone : http://www.wsc.co.uk/wsc-daily/1152-september-2012/8991-post-hillsborough-disaster-editorial

He talks bolllocks all of the time, just ignore him. The evidence found on the terrace in Brussels indicates that the Heysel rioting was heavily influenced by Combat18 and National Front supporters and the Liverpool fans were infiltrated with numerous known English hooligans from other clubs - not that it would have much relevance even if they were all bona fide scousers. As far as people at a football match running in groups and chasing the opposition away - wasn't there some footage of Saints fans doing that at Bristol Rovers on here a few months ago ? There's a reason hooligans were categorised, and it's because some are instigators, some are followers, and a lot just stay out of it. If you get a lot of people intent on causing trouble, then you're going to get others following that example. The only similarities with Hillsborough are the running crowd (vastly different in composition and motive between the two incidents) and the presence of a football team wearing all red. The lack of ability to empathise with the families of people who just went to a football match, happened to be at the front of the crowd (where kids usually went on terraces) and died because of it belies a much deeper sickness. Then again, I might be a little oversensitive to it as I was at Anfield the week before to see them beat (ironically) Sheffield Wednesday 5-1 in a morning kick off before the Grand National in the afternoon. Luckily for me, my dad wasn't able to get tickets for us for the match the week after.

Clearly as a side with very few international players until recently, we won't have had many players involved in Euro 2012 qualifying. Lower league clubs could easily have more internationals in squads for Wales, N Ireland etc during the qualifiers, and for some random smaller eastern European sides - and the Skates were in the Prem until 2010. Having said that, Shrewsbury currently only have English and Welsh players, and unless they count U-21s...

Both are subject to the vagaries of Sky scheduling too. We've got to be featured on live Sky at least 10 times this season, how many are we already signed up to ?

Just remembered I witnessed the 3 Little Pigs scrapping with Wolfie the Wolves mascot at Bristol City back in 1998/9, that was a pretty strange half time.

Damn, this is out of place. If only I'd taken the opportunity to shamelessly plug the 9 more classic replica Saints shirts I'm selling on eBay. http://www.saintsweb.co.uk/showthread.php?40025-More-Saints-Kits-For-Sale Oh well, that opportunity has passed...

The same reason there was a crush outside Fratton in 2004/5 after the police held the train arrivers back (for their own protection against the brick-chuckers), the game had started and there was a large crowd released towards the away end all at the same time. Lucky for me when the cordon finally opened I was one of the fastest to the turnstiles down Apsley Road into the Specks Lane entrance (Carisbrook Rd side - the corner with the tunnel stand immediately to the left), because behind me there was a crowd of a couple of hundred or so all arriving at the same time, all pushing against the turnstiles OUTSIDE the ground. There was a wall preventing people heading straight into the turnstile, but there was a crowd rushing the gate and at the time I remember being hugely annoyed that the turnstile operator even took the few seconds to check my ticket with the crush of the scrum behind me. There was also a large closed gate which was not opened. Plenty of police around, many preoccupied with keeping the skate "welcoming committee" in Carisbrook Road away from us though. The difference, and the reason there wasn't serious injury that day, was that there was space for the crowd to expand out at the edges - somewhere to push back into, and also the smaller crowd to begin with. Let's not pretend that people wanting to get into a ground after kick off is some kind of unexpectedly disorderly behaviour - it happens everywhere and anyone expecting "an orderly queue" is frankly a little deluded.

Well yeah, I'm just clarifying that for someone who thinks the police were actively directing people towards it. The geography of the gate and the entrance did all the channelling, as Taylor reported, the major failing was to open the gate with no method of keeping people out of the crammed areas.

You don't really seem to understand how crowds work. Once you were in that pen there was nowhere to go, and if there were the larger part of 2000 others behind you, you wouldn't have to be doing anything to exert forward pressure.

Is there any evidence of the police actively channelling fans into the central pens as you suppose ? My understanding (supported by the Mirror article) was always that the gates were opened and then there were NO attempts at steering fans anywhere by anyone. The central pens were the shaft of light and the pitch was visible from the gate and people headed there for those reasons and because it was the shortest point. Wurzel's comments earlier about the Leppings Lane stand and not seeing the side steps to the empty side pens and no-one around suggesting they went there recreates the Disaster scenario exactly.

That is an astonishingly emotive piece of writing. It also notes that there were "some" ticketless fans, as there were in 1986 when I went to the first Merseyside FA Cup Final and we all watched people bunking up the Twin Towers, and as a 13 year old I got crushed purely by the size of the crowd outside Wembley's entrances. There were a lot of mistakes, but along with the police errors, lack of crowd control, failures in signposting, stewarding, infrastructure and planning, some of those at the back of the central pens were culpable for going in without tickets. Whether they were sufficient in number to be the difference in the overcrowded pen being full or not is highly unlikely though. The treating of the dead as criminals is especially appalling, as they would have been at the front, long in the ground before the gates were opened and of course unlikely to have traces of alcohol - the drinkers would have been nowhere near the front. The one thing I have realised today is how impossible it must be for anyone who started watching football after 1992 to relate to the ground, facilities and atmosphere around football at that time. It's just nothing like the same, and that's got to be a good thing.