Jump to content
  • Sign up for free and receive a month's subscription

    You are viewing this page as a guest. That means you are either a member who has not logged in, or you have not yet registered with us. Signing up for an account only takes a minute and it means you will no longer see this annoying box! It will also allow you to get involved with our friendly(ish!) community and take part in the discussions on our forums. And because we're feeling generous, if you sign up for a free account we will give you a month's free trial access to our subscriber only content with no obligation to commit. Register an account and then send a private message to @dave u and he'll hook you up with a subscription.

The 97


Anubis
 Share

Recommended Posts

Just looked at the photos on the offal, and I never realised there was a memorial plaque at Melwood too. A nice touch, and a subtle reminder to current players and staff of how important what they do is to people, and that people lost their lives simply for going to a match to watch the players' predecessors.

 

I hope for the families that these last couple of years have started to bring about some sort of closure and inner peace. It's still sad that so many since then have lost their lives due to the stresses of the ongoing struggle for justice and/or dealing with the mental trauma of everything they witnessed on that fateful day. These people should not be forgotten either.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The FF.

 

What would y'all do if you saw somebody making vile comments about "fans killing themselves by bunking in" and you kind of knew of them Kevin Bacon 5 steps styleé and knew where they worked etc?

I’d contact them directly, but privately to tell them that those comments highlight their ignorance, and that whether or not ignorance excuses their view of things, to make those comments - even more so at this time of year - is a pretty despicable way to act, and advise them to educate themselves, and if on a public forum or social media recommend that they seek to remove them.

 

And then say absolutely nothing else about it, unless I was asked my opinion on how best they may educate themselves, or to respond if offered an apology.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The FF.

 

What would y'all do if you saw somebody making vile comments about "fans killing themselves by bunking in" and you kind of knew of them Kevin Bacon 5 steps styleé and knew where they worked etc?

 

Fuck it, if you barely know them then name and shame the dispicable ignorant bastard on social media.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 months later...

Won't say much because of the issues with online discussion, but to the families who have been waiting for justice for SO long now ...

 

Soon.

Fucking heroes every single one of them, the grit and determination that they've shown to get this far.

Many others would have given up at the first obstacle.

  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 10 months later...

As has been mentioned on another thread regarding David Conn and who excellent his is , here's another great article by him.

 

 

If anyone had been reading the summing up by the judge during the trial then it's hardly surprising.

And who'd have thought it eh Howard Wilkinson being a massive cunt .

 

Why Sheffield Wednesday cannot be charged over Hillsborough

Wednesday’s then safety officer, Graham Mackrell, has been convicted over the disaster but the club, to the families’ despair, is immune to prosecution
 
Bereaved Hillsborough families’ last sight of accountability from the football establishment for the deaths of 96 people at an FA Cup semi-final was the then Sheffield Wednesday secretary and safety officer, Graham Mackrell, driving away in a taxi from Preston crown court on Monday having been fined £6,500. Mackrell was convicted of having criminally breached his safety duties when he allocated dangerously few turnstiles – seven – for all 10,100 people with standing tickets to support Kenny Dalglish’s brilliant Liverpool team against Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest in the sunshine of 15 April 1989.

Mackrell said in a statement after Monday’s sentencing hearing that the judge, Sir Peter Openshaw, had “recognised” that his negligence “did not cause or contribute to” people dying. Openshaw did say that while Mackrell’s criminal offence was not “a direct cause” of the deaths, it was a direct cause of the crush at the turnstiles, which “set the scene” for the deadly crush inside on the terrace’s central pens.

 

Openshaw reduced Mackrell’s fine based on evidence that apart from his negligence leading to the dangerous turnstiles’ crush on the day of the disaster, he had “a good health and safety record”. Openshaw also referred approvingly to good character references provided by seven football administrators who have known Mackrell during his unbroken career in the game since 1974, which included roles for the Football Association, Premier League and Uefa after the Hillsborough disaster.

Howard Wilkinson, the former Sheffield Wednesday manager and chairman of the League Managers Association where Mackrell has worked since 2009, described Mackrell at the LMA as “competent, proficient, trustworthy, highly capable, knowledgable, drawing expertly on 40 years’ experience in the game”.

 

Stephanie Conning, who was caught in the crush at the turnstiles and went through the opened exit gate C with her older brother, Rick Jones, then 25, and his partner, Tracey Cox, 23, both of whom were killed in the crush inside, was in the court 30 years later hearing the character references read out.

“I found it intensely painful listening to these glowing testimonies about Graham Mackrell from senior football people, as part of his defence to such a serious offence,” she said. “It illustrated the fine career he went on to have after our relatives were killed and most of it was about his work after that, nothing to do with the charge.”

The Guardian asked Wilkinson for his perspective on providing the character reference in these circumstances but he declined to comment.

Sheffield Wednesday, for whom Mackrell had lobbied to host FA Cup semi-finals again after he arrived in 1986, was not charged, despite the CPS saying there was enough evidence to do so, following a new five-year police investigation, Operation Resolve. Sue Hemming, responsible for the Hillsborough prosecutions at the CPS, explained in June 2017 that charges could not be brought because the club company in 1989, Sheffield Wednesday Football Club plc, now exists “only on paper”. The current club company, Sheffield Wednesday Football Club Ltd, which certainly exists at Hillsborough where the club has played without interruption, “is a different company”, Hemming said.

 

Trevor Hicks, whose two daughters, Sarah, then 19, and Vicki, 15, were killed in the hellish crush at Hillsborough, says he does not accept that, and that it was important to families for Sheffield Wednesday to be held accountable. He and many families recall not only the dire state of the Leppings Lane end but the response of the club and Mackrell after the disaster. The Hillsborough Family Support Group struggled to persuade the club to put up a memorial and families always remember the first offer: a plaque on the wall outside the toilet next to the tunnel.

“I never accepted that CPS explanation that the current Sheffield Wednesday is a different company; I find it extremely unsatisfactory,” Hicks says. “Sheffield Wednesday were profiting in 1989 from holding the semi-final and selling us tickets but the conditions were unsafe and our loved ones died. It would have been significant for families to have accountability. Sheffield Wednesday still exists, playing at Hillsborough, and I believe the club should have been charged.”

Mackrell’s trial heard of failings at Hillsborough that included the tunnel to the central terrace pens being too steep, an unsafe layout of crush barriers in the pens, the too few turnstiles and inadequate signs to direct people to the side pens. An expert structural engineer, John Cutlack, told the court the club’s ground engineers, Eastwood and partners, had catastrophically over-calculated the Leppings Lane terrace capacity to allow far too many people in.

 

The CPS said in June 2017 that Eastwood and partners could also not be charged now because “the relevant companies from the time of the disaster have been dissolved”.

Sheffield Wednesday is understood to have been considered for prosecution for breaching duties under the Health and Safety at Work Act and Safety of Sports Grounds Act. The club companies were rearranged in 1997 when Mackrell, a qualified accountant, was still there. It was a restructuring widely carried out during the financial boom which came after the disaster, as clubs sought to attract investment and make money for their owners by floating on the stock market. Long-established FA rules limited the dividends shareholders could be paid and a holding company, plc structure was commonly used, which would leave shareholders free of those FA rules.

 

At Hillsborough under the chairmanship from 1990 of Sir Dave Richards, the club company, Sheffield Wednesday Football Club Plc, was renamed Sheffield Wednesday Plc and became the holding company. A subsidiary company was named Sheffield Wednesday Football Club Ltd and the plc transferred to it – “hived down” – its whole “undertaking of a football club”: all the club’s assets, including Hillsborough, membership of the FA and Premier League, employment of all players and staff, and all liabilities except the debts to the Co-op Bank. The document announcing the restructuring and an initial £17m investment in the plc by a merchant bank, Charterhouse, with the aim of a stockmarket float in two or three years, explicitly stated that the FA rules would apply to the subsidiary company, not the plc.

It was this financially motivated reorganisation that created the structure the CPS ultimately found to consist of different companies, so that Sheffield Wednesday could not be charged.

The club did not make it to the stock market; it struggled, was relegated in 2000, then had a decade of financial difficulties. When Milan Mandaric bought the club in 2010, he took over Sheffield Wednesday Football Club Ltd, the subsidiary company, for £1, from Sheffield Wednesday plc. That is how the plc ended up as “only a paper company”.

To the outside and football world, there has been no real difference; the club continued playing at Hillsborough, with the disaster and all the failings that caused it part of its history. When the Hillsborough Independent Panel began its review of documentation in 2009, the current Sheffield Wednesday Football Club Ltd had all the files and initiated the process of disclosing them. Sheffield Wednesday then became a legally recognised “interested party”, represented by lawyers led by Jason Beer QC, at the inquests which followed the 2012 publication of the panel’s report.

One source with knowledge of the process said the legal costs in 2014-16 were paid under an insurance policy taken out in 1989 by Sheffield Wednesday plc, now the “paper company”. A spokesman for Sheffield Wednesday said he was not able to explain whether the current club was in effect the interested party and was involved in giving instructions to the lawyers.

Beer and the same firm of solicitors, Davies Wallis Foyster, which specialises in acting for insurance companies, proceeded to conduct Mackrell’s defence through the police investigation after the inquests and the trial. Nobody acting for Mackrell was prepared to explain how his defence was funded; inquiries were directed to a public relations company, Alder, whose managing director replied: “This is not a matter on which Mr Mackrell wishes to comment.”

One authoritative source with knowledge of the process, however, said Mackrell’s legal costs – which would have been considerable paying for Beer, another QC, Simon Antrobus, a further barrister and DWF – were paid by the same Sheffield Wednesday insurance policy originally taken out in 1989. In which case the club could not be charged because that company exists only on paper, but an insurance policy it took out could still pay for the legal representation to contest the club or Mackrell being held liable for the disaster.

 

Mackrell’s fine was assessed according to sentencing guidelines, his offence categorised as creating a low risk of causing life-changing injuries or death despite police officers’ warnings on the day that the crush at the turnstiles was life-threatening. Beer argued for the fine to be reduced and Openshaw did so, owing to the evidence of Mackrell’s good character, the 30-year delay in prosecuting him and, the judge said, a “campaign of vilification” that meant “the disaster and its aftermath has had a serious and lasting effect upon him and his family”. He set it at £6,500.

Some bereaved families immediately divided that by 96, lodging in their minds an amount of £67.70 per victim, payable by the only football man to be held criminally liable in relation to the disaster at Hillsborough, 30 years on

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

With the authorities crowding round to protect its sacrificial lamb, I’m not sure the sentence was ever going to be anything much more than this, and while I’m not in a position to say, I would imagine no sentence could make anyone involved feel any better given what he was charged with, but the way I look at it as an outsider to the tragedy, is this; the man has to carry the burden of being found guilty of being at fault - in whatever part - for those deaths.

 

thats not a burden I could carry, and I expect it will weight very heavy on him.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12 hours ago, Bob Spunkmouse said:

With the authorities crowding round to protect its sacrificial lamb, I’m not sure the sentence was ever going to be anything much more than this, and while I’m not in a position to say, I would imagine no sentence could make anyone involved feel any better given what he was charged with, but the way I look at it as an outsider to the tragedy, is this; the man has to carry the burden of being found guilty of being at fault - in whatever part - for those deaths.

 

thats not a burden I could carry, and I expect it will weight very heavy on him.

It won't weigh on him at all. Because he will think it's not his fault and it's all ours. If any of these cunts who've apologised since the Hillsborough panel and the later inquest had one shred of guilt about them, they'd have apologised decades ago. 

  • Upvote 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
On 17/05/2019 at 07:09, Bob Spunkmouse said:

With the authorities crowding round to protect its sacrificial lamb, I’m not sure the sentence was ever going to be anything much more than this, and while I’m not in a position to say, I would imagine no sentence could make anyone involved feel any better given what he was charged with, but the way I look at it as an outsider to the tragedy, is this; the man has to carry the burden of being found guilty of being at fault - in whatever part - for those deaths.

 

thats not a burden I could carry, and I expect it will weight very heavy on him.

Good point, I don't think a prison sentence was ever realistically going to be given, and no monetary fine would ever be high enough anyway, although it is still insulting that it's so low. 

 

But having somebody officially recognised as being guilty, it's partly the kind of justice we've been fighting for this entire time. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 months later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share


×
×
  • Create New...