Hooligans rear their ugly heads once more

THE week now ending hasn't been perhaps the best advertisement for soccer as a prospective temporary tenant at Croke Park.

Although it has to be said that only those with a self-serving agenda for maintaining Rule 42 would use the events in Milan and, two nights later, RTÉ's screening of a documentary on the Heysel disaster, to bolster their argument against opening those gates.

Nevertheless, that soccer as a global phenomenon has yet to eradicate what was once called 'The English Disease' remains incontestable. The focus is now on Italy, where Tuesday's incendiary scenes in the San Siro were followed the next night by sighs of relief that the Juventus-Liverpool fixture in Turin was marred only - only! - by some isolated incidents in the streets and the odd skirmish in the stands.

While the dangerous barrage of flares and bottles in Milan was the knee-jerk response of fans apparently outraged by the performance of the referee, the Turin game was burdened with the weight of a terrible history. Unfortunately, the lessons of the latter apparently went unheeded at the former, where only fate protected goalkeeper Dida from injuries worse than minor burns, and spared others, who found themselves under the rain of fire, from nothing more than the trauma of being caught up in what looked like the final scene in 'Apocalypse Now'.

But to truly find what Captain Kurtz, quoting Joseph Conrad, called 'the horror, the horror', you had to do nothing more than turn on your television on Thursday night and watch the RTE/Channel 4 co-production 'Heysel - The Day Football Died'. Or, at least, watch as much as you could through your tears.

We already knew the facts - 39 dead after Liverpool fans charged Juventus supporters at the European Cup Final of 1985 - and many of us even recall watching the grim drama unfolding that night, live on television. But a full 20 years on, this harrowing documentary spared no viewer the full impact of what can happen when part of a football crowd turns violent.

While the programme did make clear that there were other factors which contributed to the extent of the disaster and, in particular, the huge death toll - ineffective policing, negligible segregation, lack of paramedic support and the state of ill-repair of the stadium itself - it quite properly placed the focus on the primary cause, the single inescapable fact without which 39 Italian people would still be alive. And that was the taste for aggro which prompted hundreds of Liverpool fans to break down a flimsy mesh fence and charge at the spectators massed on the other side.

The Italian club had its own hardcore fans, but the Juve ultras were located at the other end of the ground. Section Z was supposed to have been for neutrals but touts got their hands on the tickets with the result that this section filled up with the kind of decent people for whom a rumble with the opposition was never on the agenda - here were family groups, men, women and children, the elderly and the young, out to enjoy the spectacle of a European Cup final. It was a slaughter of the innocents. When the Liverpool hardcore charged, the Italians did what seemed the sensible thing; indeed they did what you or I would almost certainly have done - they ran for their lives. The result was that hundreds at the other end of Section Z were pressed up against a wall, when the wall collapsed with a sound loud enough to penetrate the Liverpool dressing room, the human avalanche began.

The proximity of television and still cameras to what followed, leant an intimacy to the horror that can haunt your dreams even now. Photographer Eamonn McCabe talked about taking his searing black and white images of those at the bottom of the heap, their eyes pleading and arms reaching out in despair and panic, as the very life was squeezed out of them. Italian television showed one young man frantically attempting to pour water from a bottle into the mouth of his fallen friend. A paramedic who sees that more urgent action is required forces him to remove the bottle so that he can apply CPR to his friend's chest. We don't know if he survived.

Many who did save themselves could do so only at the expense of those buried beneath them, forced by the pressure of the crowd behind to scramble down from the broken wall over a mounting pile of the dead and dying. One young man, who lost clothing in the crush, recalled his escape: "At least I didn't have shoes on but it's not something I am proud of."

Arguably the most heart-breaking testimony was that of a father who had taken his 14-year-old son to the big game. In the chaos, he lost sight of his boy and it was some time before he found him lying on the ground. He put his ear to his chest and was relieved to hear a heartbeat. Then he stood up and realised that the pulse he'd heard was in his own temple. His son was already dead.

"I didn't know what I was going to tell his mother," he recalled, a simple, poignant thought which points to the fact that, beyond the immediate trauma and loss of the life, there would be a whole world of grief for those left behind.

Many in the ground were unaware of the death toll and there are still conflicting reports about precisely what players on either side knew, although there's no doubt that both teams were aware that there had been loss of life.

In which case, it's a pity that the programme's producers didn't interview Michel Platini to establish what the Juve captain actually knew about the extent of the disaster when he scored the winning goal from the penalty spot - at the Section Z end of the ground - and raced off to celebrate, as if he'd just done something glorious, or even something that mattered at all.

Twenty years ago, aggression at a football match resulted in 39 dead. Twenty years on, aggression at a football match saw a goalkeeper hit by a flare and a game abandoned. That's progress, I suppose, but if lessons can only be learned the hard way, then Inter should have been made to pay more heavily for the excesses of their lunatic fringe.

Otherwise, football will surely find another way, and another day, to die.

As for Rule 42, well, if Linfield can wear black armbands to mark the Pope's death - as they did against Longford Town - is it so unthinkable that a game of soccer might be played on Croker's holy ground?