Irish fan tells of chaos at ground

“IT WAS probably one of the most horrifying scenes anyone could ever witness,” Mr James Bowen, of Foxrock, Co Dublin, said yesterday. Mr Bowen said he had been invited over to the match as a guest of the Irish Civil Service Building Society.

Mr Bowen said he and a colleague, Mr Tony Moroney, arrived at the stadium at 2.30pm. He said he noticed a very large number of Liverpool supporters drinking outside and in close proximity to the Leppings Lane entrance gates. He said there were five mounted police at the turn-stiles and a couple of policemen on foot. Mr Moroney discovered he had no film in his camera and went back to buy some while he waited for 14 minutes, said Mr Bowen.

At close to 2.45 “the whole scene had changed”, he said. Mr Moroney had returned and told him if he’d been two minutes later, he doubted if he would have been able to get in given the chaos and confusion outside. “At this stage people were starting to climb in over the wall and the police could neither stop them getting in over the wall nor try to sort out the problem at the turnstiles,” said Mr Bowen. “As far as I could see some fellows had no tickets at all. They were pulling out pound notes; they were just breaking down the whole system and when the system broke down, the situation got hostile outside the gates. The police made a quick decision to open the gates and let them into the ground.”

The two men made for the north stand, for which they had tickets. It was 2.47pm, recalled Mr Bowen, adding he noted the times on the stadium clock throughout.

Within minutes, he said, the situation had deteriorated dramatically in the west stand terrace. There was terrible confusion and what appeared to be fighting. This seemed inexplicable as they were all Liverpool supporters, but then he realised fans were being crushed against security railings.

“The kids now started trying to get out over the railing and the police thought they were trying to form a mass breakout to attack the Forest supporters. Fans from the middle sections of the terrace were trying to move into the side sections and those at the front of the terrace were trying to get onto the pitch. But there were about five policemen and one, policewoman trying to push them back.”

Meanwhile, most members of a massive police cordon stood back and made no effort whatsoever, he said. They opened a small gate and let a handful of people through, but it was too late. There were too many bodies up against the front railing. At 3.06pm the match was stopped. By 3.10pm a large number of spectators were on the pitch, said Mr Bowen, “and the Forest supporters didn’t know what was happening”.

Liverpool supporters who knew what was wrong started to move down “either to explain it to them or to attack them” when police . . . pushed them back into the goal area, said Mr Bowen. “The next thing we noticed was four stretchers appeared and all of a sudden there were bodies coming past in all states of disarray.”

He planned to write to the chairman of Liverpool FC and to the South Yorkshire police to make “constructive criticisms” of the police force. It seemed to be trained to deal with “gurriers in a riot situation”, but had “no capacity, flair or even intuition” to deal with Saturday’s disaster.