When a Game Turned Into a Disaster‘30 for 30: Soccer Stories’ on ESPN Revisits Hillsborough (
New York Times)
By MIKE HALE
APRIL 14, 2014
“Hillsborough,” Tuesday night on ESPN, is a soccer movie with very little soccer in it. It’s about a match played 25 years ago at the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, England, that ended after just six minutes — when the realization set in that amid the festive atmosphere of an F.A. Cup semifinal, fans were being crushed to death a few yards behind the west goal.
This powerful documentary, directed by Daniel Gordon (“The Game of Their Lives”), feels less like a sports film than an Errol Morris-style true-crime investigation. It’s interesting, and perhaps admirable, that ESPN chose it to inaugurate “30 for 30: Soccer Stories,” a series of documentaries leading up to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. “Hillsborough” is not about what Pelé called the beautiful game.
The death toll from the match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest would reach 96, and it would take more than two decades of inquiries to establish that the police were at fault for failing to control thousands of fans who crammed into a few small standing-room sections. (The more evocative British term for these concrete death traps: the pens.)
Mr. Gordon uses game film, re-creations and heartbreaking interviews with survivors, relatives of the victims, police officers and investigators. He lays out the deadly events in lucid and unsparingly grim terms. Burly policemen go silent recalling the helplessness they felt. “Your primary duty is to protect life,” one says, a sob in his voice. “Not catch villains, your primary duty is to protect life. And there were all these dead people there.”
But Mr. Gordon is just as interested in the long tail of the story: the efforts of the police, helped by some newspapers, to cover up their own responsibility and to lay the blame on the visiting Liverpool fans, who were falsely accused of storming the turnstiles. It was 23 years before a government-formed panel conclusively reported that the fans were not to blame, which led to a new criminal inquest that was convened just two weeks ago.
“The price of Hillsborough is not reducible to 96 people dying,” says Phil Scraton, a criminologist and member of the 2012 panel. “The price of Hillsborough is the price of institutionalized injustice, the appalling treatment by some of the media of the good reputations of innocent people, the cavalier way in which wonderful people were vilified. That’s the price of Hillsborough.”
30 for 30: Soccer Stories
Hillsborough
ESPN, Tuesday night at 8, Eastern and Pacific times; 7, Central time.
Directed by Daniel Gordon.