When putting bums on seats means just that

AS NICK HORNBY points out in his brilliant book Fever Pitch, there was a strange buzz on the Highbury terrace on 15 April 1989; before half-time, some of those holding radios to their ears had lost interest in the football. Odd rumours were circulating. And the sense of strangeness intensified when the Liverpool score wasn't read out with all the others at half-time. Then, at the end of the break, there was a hurried, nervous message over the PA: there had been an incident in the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough, and early reports were saying that as many as seven Liverpool fans were dead.

Of course, it wasn't just seven dead, it turned out to be 95, and that afternoon changed football forever; it precipitated the end of a whole way of life - the life of the terrace. Because of Hillsborough, the football authorities ruled that stadiums must be all- seater or nothing. Suddenly, everybody realised that our stadiums were rubbish compared with stadiums in America, France, Italy, Spain . . . virtually anywhere. Most of ours were built 100 years ago, like so much else in this country - the prisons, the railway lines - and all these things are falling to pieces. The infrastructure is going to hell, and we can't afford to replace it.

But this isn't just a problem with buildings. It's in the mind - in the British mentality. It's our attitude that doesn't work any more. A hundred years ago, we were a big, well-run machine which ruled the world, and everything in our culture followed on: the class structure, the town planning, the education. And now all those ideas are worth nothing, but they're still there, and, like all the rotting old buildings, impossible to replace. So we're going round putting seats in our stadiums, pretending that this will solve things, kidding ourselves that our problems are, essentially, architectural. But it wasn't bad architecture that caused the Hillsborough disaster.

Standing on terraces was, in lots of ways, a much better way to watch football. For a start, you were cold and wet and you got jostled and barged and carried through the air - like the players you came to watch, you were going through a physical experience. A standing crowd, unlike people in seats, has a will of its own; everybody contributes to the collective feeling. You're not just yourself, you're all these other people as well. Great when everybody's feeling good; a nightmare when things go wrong, and you're in there with the violent uneducated city-dwelling great-grandsons of the builders of a ruined Empire. These people are mean. Maybe you can't blame them, but they are mean. I once watched an Arsenal free kick in which the ball hit a Coventry player smack in the face; he went straight down, limbs collapsing, landing in a heap, a really sickening sight, and for a second I thought he's dead, and in the same second I was surrounded by cheering, happy people punching the air . . . yes] He's hurt]

It's 1988. I've come to White Hart Lane to watch Arsenal play Tottenham, as a nominal Arsenal supporter, and my friend and I, unable to stand with the other Arsenal fans, are in a thick Tottenham mob, pressed up against a perimeter fence. Afterwards, in a back street, not a policeman in sight, a group of us, all Spurs fans apart from the two of us, are ambushed - by Arsenal fans. We're with the enemy, and now we're being attacked by our own people. They run among us, throwing fists. It's difficult to tell each other apart. A group of about twenty cowards, me included, try to make a run for it, but a cordon has formed at the end of the road - Spurs fans trying to halt the retreat. They're shouting: 'Stand yer ground]' The Arsenal lads are right in there, shouting 'Fucking yids]' We're Arsenal fans being chased by Arsenal fans. If we get to the end of the road, we'll be hit by Tottenham fans who think we're Tottenham fans. We run at the cordon, and I punch my way through two people, and receive one good blow on the chest, and a couple of others are knocked down, and I escape, almost unhurt. In 20 years of going to football, this was my only direct physical experience of hooliganism. But it was crazy. We couldn't tell one lot from the other. It was just a free-for all; nasty young men trying to hurt, not their enemies, but whoever they could.

It's fun on the terraces. Anybody in the middle of the Aston Villa crowd can shout: 'Big fat Ron's]' and have the chance of a couple of hundred people shouting back: 'Claret and blue army]' But people don't just sing routine chants: they're clustered together, bodies up against each other, and a crowd like this communicates. New songs and chants are developed to reflect things that happen on the pitch. After Hillsborough, this is what we have to say goodbye to. Would people in seats have come up with: 'He's fat, he's round, he's worth a million pounds]' as a tribute to Peter Reid? Probably not - they'd have sung: 'There's only one Peter Reid]' over and over. And in the terrace, you really feel a goal being scored; you're carried along in a surge, landing yards away from where you were, lost in a shouting, punching mob. We'll have to say goodbye to all that as well.

'Seven Liverpool supporters are feared dead.' And then, a terrible thing happened, which Nick Hornby doesn't report - was he in a different part of the ground? What happened was this: with no hesitation at all, no time for thought, the North Bank mob I was standing in the middle of raised their fists in the air and cheered; a quick, joyful 'Yes]' This was not quite a goal, but it was a small score, in a way - something bad had happened to Liverpool, to the enemy. Seven dead? Great. Seven dead? What fun] A hundred and sixty five miles away, the real horror was entering the global image-bank: people expiring against the chicken-wire of the perimeter fences, bodies laid out in the penalty area. We knew nothing of this; that this was the day the terraces died. But seeing those fists go up in the air, hearing the shout - yes] - I might have guessed the game was up. -