The Official European Football Thread

[Pennypacker]

FINAL

Chelsea 4-4 Liverpool

Chelsea advances 7:5 on aggregate

Barcelona 1-1 Bayern Munich

Barcelona advances 5:1 on aggregate

SEMI-FINAL

Barcelona - Chelsea April 28, May 6

[jero]

That was one hell of a game!! 4-4!!!!!!!!

[Seshmeister]

That was one hell of a game!! 4-4!!!!!!!!

Damn I thought it was all over at 3-2 and turned over.

I hate Chelsea...

[Blaze]

And then there is Cricket.

[Pennypacker]

Hillsborough - The Pain Lingers 20 Years On

Leppings Lane. Open the gates. Hillsborough. Say these words to any British football fan old enough to have viewed television on April 15th 1989 and you will receive in response, at the very least, a brief flinch. For once the images were seen, and seen live, they were never to be forgotten. These words, and these twitchy reactions, are the shibboleths of the worst football disaster of these islands in modern times.

The UK has an unhappy history of such tragedies, but none, perhaps, have haunted the imagination quite as much as that of Hillsborough. Nothing proves this more than the name itself. There is the aforementioned Valley Parade fire; there is the Ibrox disaster; and then there is Hillsborough. To Hillsborough, 'disaster' is an encumbrance. Hillsborough has become a noun to indicate not just a stadium, but a tragedy.

96 dead, 300 hospitalised, hundreds more injured - and countless lives changed forever.

What Happened?

Liverpool were drawn against Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final, a match traditionally held at a neutral venue. Hillsborough, being a vast and (it was said) a relatively well-appointed arena in the north, it seemed to the Football Association to be an ideal venue for the cup semis. 1989 was no exception, as the Reds and Forest prepared to meet on April 15th.

Without going into exhaustive detail - such matters deserve more examination than I can give here, and the existing unofficial literature on the topic is extensive - 'bottlenecking' upon entry to the stadium, high fencing around the pitch, a lack of rescue coordination from ground-level police and the failure of the match commander to act in a manner commensurate with the seriousness of the situation saw overcrowding take place in the Leppings Lane end 'pens'. In essence, those who perished died of injuries borne of being crushed, as well as asphyxiation.

The old style of stadium was roundly criticised in the aftermath for being a factor in the disaster, but it took a while for the handling of the situation to come under similar scrutiny. Indeed, as we'll see, it is perhaps the herding in of fans that was as much to blame as anything else.

Pointing Fingers

The pictures of the disaster, broadcast live on the BBC, not only touched the nation but also shocked it, angered it. People wanted answers. This very human indignation, though, was not always channelled correctly. The Sun, one of the country's most influential and popular tabloids, capitalised on the disaster with one of the two most infamous front pages in its history. Editor Kelvin McKenzie gleefully recounted a litany of crimes committed by 'some' fans: attacking aid workers; robbing the dead and the dying; urinating on the police. The mood of the decade, one of stringent (and often justified) anti-hooliganism, was no doubt the motivation for these populist screams, but McKenzie had sorely misjudged his audience.

In fact, people were - for the most part, at least - far more interested in establishing a cause for the disaster, rather than gleefully rejoicing in alleged misbehaviour of 'some' fans. In any case, it later transpired that the allegations on the front page were perhaps one degree short of being complete and utter fiction, leaving the smirking, amoral figure of McKenzie with no option but to apologise.

(Years later, once the dust had settled, this squalid little coward once again displayed his true colours by sneering that he only apologised under duress, and that he was and is not sorry - he was just going on what he'd been told by a Conservative politician, who had been backed up by South Yorkshire's chief superintendent David Duckenfield, a man whose role in the tragedy will perhaps never be fully established, but whose initial dishonesty certainly has been. As for McKenzie, to this day his old newspaper remains barely circulated in Liverpool.)

Enough of him. He's had the attention that he craves. Anyway, he wasn't the only one to blame the fans.

Asking Questions

Initial police briefings, notes Phil Scraton, an academic who has extensively studied the disaster, were considerably and shamelessly 'revised', with initial statements heavily doctored in what must be assumed to be an attempt to cover tracks. It's easy to see why. Both official documents and a host of off-the-record police statements ran the gamut of fan blame, ranging from accusations of a vast conspiracy of fans to enter without tickets (in fact tickets were, despite officially being sold out on Merseyside, not hard to come by) or to invade the pitch (in fact the fence came down and the fans came streaming on in an attempt to escape death and injury.)

It took a while for these things to be established - in part, that is, for the true facts of the matter are still not 100% clear - and the police seemed to always be second to ascertain the facts... and to change their own. Even the much-lauded Taylor Report knew of these alterations, which slightly takes the shine off its condemning some aspects of the policing for the 'lack of control' on matchday.

The early clamour to blame the supporters, and to see the spectre of hooliganism behind every fan's eyes, was quietly shuffled aside. Instead, the blame went pretty much nowhere. Taylor's muted condemnation aside, individuals were not brought to task for their role in the tragedy, and the (more significant) institutional failures in South Yorkshire were discussed with no small measure of opacity. (The British citizen today may wish to draw comparisons between this incident and the official reactions to the death of a by-passer in the London demonstrations earlier this month.)

Changed Forever

Not just were lives irrevocably altered - and ruined - by the tragedy, but the sport as a whole saw the change, too. The abundance of all-seater stadia that followed the Taylor Report was the first and most obvious departure with the old; numerous more followed. I leave the examination of those to my Goal.com colleague, Zack Wilson, to reflect on in his excellent article here.

In the meantime, football will share a moment today reflecting on the 96 lives lost. It will do so not just in sadness, but also confusion and anger. The beautiful game should not - and, had things gone differently, could not - have been so hideous.

Courtesy Goal.com

[Pennypacker]

Update

Halftime

Porto 0-1 Manchester United

C. Ronaldo 6'

Manchester leads 3:2 on aggregate

Arsenal 1-0 Villarreal

Walcott 10'

Arsenal leads 2:1 on aggregate

[Pennypacker]

FINAL

Porto 0-1 Manchester United

Manchester United advance 3:2 on aggregate

Arsenal 3-0 Villarreal

Arsenal advance 4:1 on aggregate

Semi Finals

Chelsea-Barcelona
Arsenal-Manchester United

[Seshmeister]

More proof that club football is now entirely about who has the most money.

The 6 out of the 8 quarter finalists were in the top 8 richest. The two that weren't, Villarreal and Porto are now gone.

Manchester United Declared The World's Richest Club Ahead Of Real Madrid - Report - Goal.com

Richest clubs: (€, 000,000's)

1 Manchester United 1,423
2 Real Madrid 1,030
3 Arsenal 913
4 Bayern Munich 845
5 Liverpool 768
6 Milan 753
7 Barcelona 730
8 Chelsea 609
9 Juventus 457
10 Schalke 04 388
11 Tottenham Hotspur 339
12 Olympique Lyonnais 322
13 Roma 290
14 Inter Milan 281
15 Hamburg 251
16 Borussia Dortmund 247
17 Manchester City 236
18 Werder Bremen 222
19 Newcastle United 217
20 Stuttgart 201
21 Aston Villa 183
21 Olympique de Marseille183
23 Celtic 166
24 Everton 158
25 Rangers 148

[jero]

anyone saw Barcelona - Real madrid?

[Pennypacker]

Yes I did. We were watching it at work and noone came close to predicting a 6-2 win for Barcelona.

More importantly, anyone watch Inter-Lazio? Big win for us, 4 games left and 7 points ahead of AC Milan

[Pennypacker]

Amazing goal by Essien !!

1-0 Chelsea HT

[Seshmeister]

HAHAHAHAHAHA 1st shot on target!

1-1

Go Barca!

[Pennypacker]

Wow!!!! Iniestaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fuck you chelsea!!! No repeat final this year

[Seshmeister]

Fuck the Russian gangster!

Too funny.

[Seshmeister]

Hah!

Funny watching that cheat Drogba who has made a career of diving complaining about not getting penalties.