Six weeks in Springtime

Like a lot of the world, football is currently on hold. Paul Scraton reflects on the six weeks in 1989, that taught him so much about the game we’re already missing.

Now that football has stopped, I think about those six weeks in the spring of 1989 when I learned about the ways in which this game is important and the ways it isn’t. I think about the memories and the moments it has given me, and how none of it is worth a single life.

15th April 1989

Liverpool play Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough in Sheffield. 96 people go to a football match and never come home. In Burscough, I am nine years old. My brother is seven. We’re playing football in the garden, then messing about in our room. Dad tells us something has happened. I remember the images on the television. Of fans carrying other fans across the pitch. The sun is shining. The grass is so green. I don’t know now if I really remember seeing it live. I’ve seen the footage so many times that I’m no longer sure.

22nd April 1989

We travel the 14 miles from Burscough into Liverpool and join the thousands who have come to remember and pay their respects to those who died. We go into the stadium and pass the sea of flowers in front of the Kop. I’ve only been to the ground a couple of times, and I’m excited, even though I know I shouldn’t be, to be in that place where my heroes play. A chain of scarves links Anfield with Goodison Park, the home of our rivals Everton, and I leave my favourite scarf by the stadium gates. There are so many there, from teams across the country, across the world.

6th May 1989

I’m ten years old. My birthday party is football-themed, and we meet at our house and then go to Richmond Park to play a match. I’m wearing my Crown Paints Liverpool kit. I want Catherine on my team. She’s the best player in our primary school, but I think my Dad knows this. He makes the two of us captains. Of course, Catherine’s team wins. They always did. It’s my birthday, and I walk home in a grump. She should have been on my team. It’s only a game.

20th May 1989

For the second time in four years, half of Merseyside is on Wembley Way for the FA Cup Final. Since Hillsborough, football has stopped and started again. Players and staff have attended funerals, the semi-final played. Like 1986, they’re on the cusp of winning the Double: like 1986, they’re playing city rivals Everton. The match is draining to watch, let alone play. Everton keep coming back but Liverpool win in extra-time, and lift the cup once more.

26th May 1989

Arsenal arrive under the Friday floodlights at Anfield with the impossible task: to beat Liverpool by two clear goals. To wrestle the championship away from this glorious team, from Houghton and Whelan, Barnes and Beardsley, Rush and Aldridge. We’re allowed to stay up to watch it: to watch those agonising final minutes, where Michael Thomas skips through and chips Grobbelaar. To watch the Arsenal fans, delirious on the corner terrace. To watch Arsenal lift the trophy as Anfield salutes both sets of players and the impossible job that faced them all.

I think back to those six weeks in springtime and the three decades that have passed since. Through my dad’s work, our family became connected to Hillsborough, to the families and survivors, many of whom became our friends. After those weeks I knew, even at that age, that football was not as important as life and death, but I also saw what it meant even in the darkest times. I would learn too how the collective voice of the Kop, more than just helping to win football matches, could play its part in a long fight for truth and justice.

For me, football means two things which are represented in the events of those six weeks. The first is community. It’s the chain of all those scarves. It’s the unwavering support that Everton Football Club and its fans have given to the Hillsborough families for more than three decades. It’s every away fan who has paused at the Anfield Memorial to take those 96 lives into their thoughts.

The other thing those six weeks showed me was that football, on the pitch (and only on the pitch), was drama. The FA Cup Final against Everton and the league decider against Arsenal, six days apart, were two of the most draining sporting spectacles I have ever witnessed. Everton’s cruel defeat. Arsenal’s last-gasp winner as the Liverpool players fell to the floor. This is what makes football so alluring: the stories where a twist is always possible, where the actors alone pull the strings

I love all that football has given me. The intensity of the experiences, the joy of watching the team. My team. For a couple of years now they have been the best Liverpool I can remember, at least since that team of Barnes and Beardsley. This season they are on the verge of winning the title for the first time since 1990, perhaps even breaking the points total along the way. If they get there, it will be wonderful, but it’s still only football. As Jürgen Klopp said, if only one life is saved by shutting down football then it is worth it.

As I write, more memories come to me: May 2005, walking to a beer garden in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, wearing a red Liverpool shirt on the weekend after Istanbul. An old man smiles as I pass. ‘Congratulations!’ he says, in German, as if I’d kicked every ball. And then: September 2012, the day after the Hillsborough Panel delivers its report and the Prime Minister apologises in Parliament to the families and survivors. I walk through Berlin-Mitte, wearing a black t-shirt. JFT96: Justice for the 96. A young man catches my eye on a street. He doesn’t smile, but he nods, and then he mouths three words: ‘We did it.’

Paul Scraton is a writer and editor based in Berlin. He is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of a number of books including Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).