The Kraken

If he could manage to not get himself sent off once in a while, and manage to not be a complete bell end, that would be a good start.

Well, we'll have to agree to disagree on that one. But, rather than rely on one third hand report as you are happier to do, I think I'd probably consider it more prudent to rely upon an official report that had access to all evidence, including: Witness evidence from police officers at the game. Witness evidence from surviving fans in the stands and around the ground. Television evidence and CCTV footage. Witness evidence from stewards and emergency services personnel at the ground. Separate reports (including projections of crowd numbers from all video footage) from a separate HSE investigation. Crowd numbers from Hillsborough own computerised turnstiles records. To each their own I guess, but I'd probably be more confident that the methods I support might be more accurate than yours.

Exactly this pap, I thoroughly agree, it alone makes the notion of releasing all information seem the only sensible course of action. Then everyone will have the means available to make their own appropriate judgement of what happened in full posession of all evidence to hand.

It doesn't read particularly well, granted. But Taylor interviewed a huge number of officers for his report, many of whom offered only an opinion of the day, not facts. He therefore had to make a judgement on how accurate he deemed their statements. The HSE of course are an independent body, and that their numbers corroborate what those police officers suggested should also be taken into account.

I feel we're still going round with this accusation, so I've included the relevant section from the Taylor Report that dealt with this. Were Fans Without Tickets a Major Factor in the Build-Up? 200. It has become a fact of football life that fans do turn up at all-ticket matches without tickets. It is not possible to give an accurate figure or even a reliable estimate of the number without tickets on 15 April. Police estimates varied from about 200 to about 2,000. There were certainly frequent requests for tickets or "spares" during the hours before the build-up. Many of those warned off by the police were seen to return to the area. Some were hanging about on the bridge. Again, however, the police witnesses who most impressed me did not consider the number of ticketless fans to be inordinately large. This accords with two other sources of evidence. 201. First, there was a wide range of witnesses who observed inside the ground that the Liverpool end was at a late stage well below capacity save for pens 3 and 4. The north stand still had many empty seats and the wing pens were sparse. The match being a sell-out, there were clearly many ticket holders to come and they could account for the large crowd still outside the turnstiles. Had the Liverpool accommodation been full by 2.40pm, one could have inferred that most or much of the large crowd outside lacked tickets. 202. Secondly, such figures as are available from the Club's electronic monitoring system and from analyses by the HSE suggest that no great number entered without tickets. They show that the number who passed through turnstiles A to G plus those who entered through gate C roughly equalled the terrace capacity figure of 10,100 for which tickets had been sold. The Club's record showed 7,038 passed through turnstiles A to G. However, the counting mechanism on turnstile G was defective, so the HSE did a study using the video film and projecting figures from the other turnstiles. This gave an assessment of 7,494, with a maximum of 7,644 passing through A to G. Again, using the video, the HSE assessed the number who entered the ground whilst gate C was open at 2,240 with a maximum of 2,480. Accordingly, the HSE's best estimate of the total entering through gate C and turnstiles A to G was 9,734 with a maximum of 10,124.1 recognise that these can only be rough checks because, for example, some with terrace tickets were allowed through turnstiles 1 to 16 and there would be other similar factors which have not formed part of the assessment. Nevertheless, the figures do suggest that there was not a very significant body of ticketless fans in the crowd which built up.

I maybe agree that any cover-up was at the behest of senior officers (and there is certainly enough smoke to suggest that was certainly the case). I'm not sure how much further up the establishment it went; there is certainly an enormous amount of criticism of the manner in which the inquests and judicial reviews were conducted by senior judges and barristers, but whether there was influence brought to bear on them from within Government, I just don't know. It'll definitely be an interesting one to see either way. I think the biggest wrong that can be put right, though, is the sensationalist press reporting, particularly from the inquest, which re-opened old wounds and laid a huge amount of accusations at the victims (and indeed the survivors) with absolutely no recourse or opportunity for rebuttal. And the press swarmed all over this, seizing on one-sided accusations from senior officers of a boozed up unstoppable army of fans being at fault, resulting in terrible headlines yet again. Any clarification in public perception as to exactly what happened throughout that whole day can only be a good thing.

I truly don't believe that to be the case. The interim Taylor Report (the final report only dealt with recommendations for stadium safety) was actually well received by the families and those associated with them; there are a few holes and minor criticisms of it but overall it is still held up and considered as an effective investigation of what led up to the day and why it occured. The subsequent inquests, however, stopped well short of a full analysis of everything that happened trhoughout the day. There are far too many unanswered questions for me to list here, but questions such as why were 40 odd ambulances outside the stadium refused entry to help the injured/dying? Why did the coroner assume all 94 inside the stadium who died had perished prior to 3.16pm? Why therefore was no evidence from 3.16 onwards heard at the inquest? The release of information is so that a full picture of the whole day can be pieced together. I don't believe it looks to blame police any further than the Taylor Report currently does, laying the cause of the disaster at their feet. It's just a thirst for information from people who've loved lost ones, and want to know exactly why.

We can only currently rely upon the Taylor Report, as it is the one document that relies upon a wealth of information none of us have been privy to. Is that in itself not even more justifcation to have access to the unrestricted documents? Which is what this whole campaign has been about.

UP, you seem to have a grasp of what Lord Justice Taylor's report covered, and where is placed the blame. Unfortunate that others don't even seem to have read it, yet feel fanastically placed to throw around unfounded accusations totally at odds with the one report which did not rely on atrociously misleading press headlines and instead used more evidence than any other enquiry to date. It's also unfortunate that, with massive amounts of evidence from that day still unavailable and so many unanswered questions as to why the procedures that should have prevented this terrrible disaster were either missed, ignored or bypassed, there should even be the question of why this is happening? There's no re-writing of history; as per Taylor's report, the failure of police control was the cause of this disaster. The nature and state of the dilapidated stadium, and the behaviour of the fans, exacerbated the problem. No-one is looking to change that outcome, just to have access to all of the documents that surrounded the investigation at the time and have since been buried. And ask some questions, such as why did the coroner's investigation rule out anything that happened in the ground after 3.16pm, and only consider events prior to that? I fail to see why this is a bad thing, there are still huge amounts of unanswered questions and without doubt IMO some form of cover up. Exposing that is no bad thing.

I've never said the crowd are not responsible in a small way; however, I keep referring to the Taylor Report as that is the official investigation and relies on much more factual information than any of us have ever seen. That says that the behaviour of the fans exacerbated the problem rather than were the cause. So yes, of course, if they's been in a nice line outside you'd hope the gates wouldn't have been opened. The fact that it was such a scrum outside though once again leads to the official cause of the disaster, a failure of police control. Oh, and your drunk comment, I'll refer you to my first pots in this thread; Taylor refuted the blame being apportioned to drunken Liverpool fans.

You have a point in a way; but it's akin to saying that the overwhelming fault of any driving accident is that the person was driving at the time. It fails to address any other reasons for what may have had more effect in causing the crash in the first place. Sometimes there is an acceptable level of risk, and if a significant number of other procedures had been carried out as they should have been, the crush wouldn't have happened. Yes, the fences were a contributing factor to the amount of deaths, you'd be completely daft to suggest otherwise. But it doesn't stop that fact that it required a complete catastrophe of wrong decision making and lack of correct procedures and mistakes being made to eventually lead to that scenario.

F*ck me, this is getting ridiculous. This was an accusation that was made at the time; an accusation that was refuted by the Taylor Report. IT DIDN'T HAPPEN. There weren't thousands of fans there without tickets; by Taylor's report there were no significant numbers without tickets. And by all monitoring evidence used, the amount of fans inside the stand at the time of the crush was judged to be below the official capacity of the stand. The complete failure of police control (the official cause of the disaster according to Taylor) meant that far too many fans were directed into the central pens, while the pens at the side remained nearly empty. That is what caused the crush, not there being too many fans there. You said it yourself: "People should let go, move on but not forget those 96 that perrished in one of British footall worst tragedy's." It's rather difficult to do that when people such as yourself still peddle such ridiculous, untrue accusations about everything that happened. The release of all information will hopefully go some way to correct that, so that accusations such as yours can be given the short shrift they deserve.

in which case you disagree with the findings of the Taylor Report, and what actually happened that day.

You're correct about the general misconceptions flying around. But i don't agree with your assertion that the disaster relied on a combination of all three to have happened. The Taylor Report has already identified where the fault level lie, and the failure of police control was found as the official cause of the disaster. The poor design of the stadium and also the behaviour of the fans were seen as exacerbating the disaster rather than being a cause in themselves. So yes, I'd agree, while there is a sense of blame being apportioned, this disaster simply wouldn't have happened without a massive catalogue of failures by the police. Yet you only have to look through this thread to see that there is still a massive amount of misinformation being peddled about the actual cause of what happened, so if the release of all information goes some way to redress this balance then I'm glad that can happen.

The littany of errors made by the police (as highlighted in the Taylor Report) was in no way confined to only outside the ground. As I've said above, the amount of people inside the ground was well below the capacity of the stand. However, as well as the well publicised catalogue of errors outside the ground (opening of side gates, stupidly low number of turnstiles, opening of the main exit gates) there were a number of failures that occurred inside the ground that massively contributed to the disaster. No police officers or stewards were stationed within the stands (when they usually were for football games at Hillsborough) to physically block access to the full central pens and force fans to enter the vacant side pens. It is questions such as why were so many of these regular procedures ignored/missed, why there were zero police officers or stewards inside the stand that day, questions that have never been answered, that there is such a clamour for all information to be released and why it can only be a good thing that finally this information will enter the public domain.

It's this type of thoroughly ignorant comment that make it such a good thing that all information is due to be released, so that the actual facts are known rather than a reliance on second hand, unreliable accusations. The Taylor Report has already dealt with the accusation that hordes of drunk fans without tickets were responsible for the terrible scenes that day; in actual fact the amount of people in the Leppings Lane end during the crush was still far below its capacity, and Taylor commented in his report that most fans "were not drunk, nor even the worse for drink". So the Taylor Report therefore throughly rejected the claims that there were a significant amount of fans there without tickets and that drunkenness also played a major part.

Scroll down to hypo's first post on that thread, and I think it sums it up perfectly: Personally, I see nothing at all wrong with that comment. An evaluation of the evidence to hand, and then a confirmation that any judgement of the player would only be made after seeing him first hand. Hypo is absolutely right with the comparisons with de Ridder, many people were wetting themselves about how good he was going to be based on his previous club's fans' reccomendations. To highlight Celtic fans opinions of him wasn't writing him off, merely showing a relfection of what they thought of him. As I've said, the majority of people were therefore rightly skeptical of him, but certainly did not write him off before seeing him play.

Which is what the majority of people did. But despite that, anyone saying that they were even slightly skeptical about the signing (after having missed out on our previous targets) were jumped on as having written off the player completely before he'd played a game. Of course everyone was going to wait and see what he was actually like as a player before making their minds up; but the hysterical brigade couldn't see beyond that and made an issue where there really wasn't one.

1. Who really knows? I assume the £20M you refer to is £13M purchase price and £7M reported losses to date? As I referred to in my original post, the Chamberlain sale has probably evened us up a good deal on profit and loss. And I doubt the family would just walk away from the club without looking for a realistic sale price, no; indeed, who would? I don't think it's too much to assume that, right now, our sale price would probably be in excess of £13M (given all our assets, which have no mortgages attached to them). So they'd be pretty sure to get the original purchase price back, at the very least. But I'm slightly confused to what you mean; the money paid to purchase us came from Markus Liebherr himself, and ownership has transferred to his family since his death. I can't think of a good reason why the family would look to recoup that original £13M directly from the club itself, given that (a) they didn't pay it and (b) it was not paid as a loan to the club but to the administrator to purchase the club outright. But I guess it's possible (however unlikely), unless I'm completely missing the gist of what you're trying to suggest, it seems you're suggesting SFC owe the Liebherr estate £20M? 2. I don't think my point was to highlight the differences between our two club's youth setups (although I don't think it's arrogant or condescending to suggest that our academy model is one which you and probably many other clubs would aspire to). It was more intended to highlight the various other revenue streams that we have available as a club aside from standard ticket prices, so including the corporate hospitality etc, which are a very necessary resource in this day and age. And even more so with the new financial control systems coming into play. Not having that, and despite your recent sales the lack of a reputed scholar's academy, does put your club at a sincere disadvantage. You only have to look how one of your own, Alex Chamberlain, came to us as your setup was considered far inferior.

http://www.saintsfc.co.uk/page/PreviewDetail/0,,10280~2466686,00.html According to this article on the OS, he was in contention for the Watford game. As we weren't short of options I guess it wasn't worth risking him, so he could get another couple of weeks of fitness under his belt.

You're an optimist.

I think this is correct. The definition of insanity: doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. From what we can tell no lessons have been learnt from their spell in administration. Still spending significant sums on signing players (sums that the club clearly can't afford) and, by Corp's own admission, expecting the owners to prop up the funding shortfall. I would find it funny were it not so tragic and obvious, and had we not seen it all before so recently.

Yes, the Liebherrs I'm sure do want us to become self-sufficient. Which is why the £12M received for Alex Chamberlain will go a very long way to making this year's balance sheet look rather more healthy. In fact, if the worst case scenario were to happen and the Liebherrs left, not only would be left with a club with minimal debt but we would also have our tried, tested and renowned academy. The Academy runs at an estimated £1M per year. Notable departures in recent years have netted the club significant sums, including: Alex Chamberlain: £12M (reportedly up to £15M) Theo Walcott: £9.1M (downgraded from original fee of up to £12M) Gareth Bale: £7M (downgraded from original fee of up to £10M) Wayne Bridge: £7M Chris Baird: £3M Andrew Surman: £1.2M David McGoldrick: £1M Leon Best: £650K Dexter Blackstock: £500K Nathan Dyer: £400K So just those players alone have yielded over £40M in incoming transfer fees in the past 8 years; that's £5M per year. Take off say £10M for 8 years of the academy running, and its roughly £4M per year in profit from the academy. Which, at this level of football, goes a massively long way to helping the club run on an even keel. Also, I'm not overly sure if your estimates for our revenue included corporate sales, hospitality suites etc etc (you mention "commercial" but I assume you mean things like replica kit sales etc for this; if not, then these indeed need to be factored in). Hospitality and corporate sales are relatively low numbers to overall crowd (I believe our corporate areas provide seating for up to 2,500), but they are very high profit sales and make a significant impact upon our overall turnover and profit figures (even at their relatively low level of take-up whereby only around 50%- 60% of corporate boxes seem to be occupied on a match by match basis. So really, the infrastructure that we currently have at the club (and are looking to improve) provides the football club with a very healthy injection of revenues to enable us to head towards the aim of self-sufficiency with some confidence.

I'd suggest that would be the least appropriate time for it; All Saints Day means equally honouring all past "Saints", not highlighting one in importance over any others.

I'd suggest the majority of the transfers we've brought in or tried and failed to bring in are with this season and the Premier League in mind. Cork, de Ridder, Fox I'd maintain are good enough to step up. Sharp, Rodriguez and other targets again, all good enough for a stint in the Pem (although I think we'd also need to also improve in som other areas of the team).