Hillsborough

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Read this on another forum i use from a guy who went to the match please read at your will if you wish he was one of the lucky ones.

On Saturday 15 April 1989, eight of us set off from Nottingham for Sheffield under a beautiful blue sky. Liverpool were playing Nottingham Forest in an FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough, and our two cars - one carrying four Forest fans, one four Liverpool fans - made short work of the motorway. We had made a loose arrangement to meet up after the game (no mobiles back then), but when our driver parked the car a mile or so from Hillsborough, we realised we'd come in at the west end of the ground, behind the Leppings Lane stand - the Liverpool end.

I'd been a Liverpool fan since I was six years old. I went to my first cup final at 16, and had my first season ticket on the Kop before I'd left school. But in 1988-89, aged 19 and in my gap year, I couldn't afford one. Two weeks before the semi-final, the phone went. My brother, a Forest season ticket holder, had a spare. "It's for the Forest end, mate," he said. "Come and educate yourself."

Now, as we approached the stadium on Leppings Lane, we split up - I'd only met the other three lads for the first time that day - and I set off for the Forest end. The residential streets around the stadium were barricaded at each end, so I approached two policemen and asked how to get round the ground. "You don't," they said. I moved on to the next street, where a senior officer, wearing a flat hat, was talking to a constable. I asked again. "You a Liverpool fan? You're not going up the Forest end. Forget it." They turned away.

I hid any trace of my colours and gave it one last try. Fifty yards on stood another senior officer. He stopped me before I got within five yards of him. "I've just seen you," he said. "You've already spoken to four of my men and I know what they've told you." He pointed at the entrance to the Leppings Lane stand. "Now get to that turnstile right on the end. The fella there is letting in fans with Forest tickets."

Strangely, I turned to walk away. That fella wasn't going to let me in with a Forest ticket. But I hadn't walked a few steps before the policeman shouted at me. I'll never forget his words: "This is your last chance," he said. It wasn't an offer. Two minutes later, I was through the turnstile. As I made my way towards the tunnel that led to the terrace behind the goal, I didn't dare look back. I couldn't believe my luck.

It was 2.15pm when I walked into pen 3 on the Leppings Lane and took up a spot just to the right of Bruce Grobbelaar's goal, about 10ft from the perimeter fence. I had travelled to matches alone since I was 15, and today, as always, I made for the liveliest spot, right among the choir and the comedians. For 10 minutes I stood in the sun, taking in the sight of a big old stadium slowly filling up on FA Cup semi-final day, leaning idly on one of the crash barriers that stood like staples on the terraces to limit a crowd surge.

By 2.30pm it was getting strangely uncomfortable. Looking around, I could see that fans older and clearly more seasoned than me were getting edgy. I shrugged two people off my back and pushed my way under the crush barrier, so that it was now behind me, and not on my chest. Ten minutes later, it would have been too late. By then, 20 minutes before kick-off, the crowd around me was wheezing and sweating and settling slowly, grudgingly, like cement. I had been in tight crowds before, but this was different. A silence was falling over the people around me. Some were hyperventilating, others were fainting. I was starting to panic now, but I was stuck. The pressure was tightening like a vice. My eyes began searching for police, or stewards, but no one was coming. Slowly, my legs, my backside, my arms and finally my chest went numb. One ear was folded in against my cheekbone by the head of a man to my right. I could move my head, my eyes and my mouth, and no more. My right foot seemed to move involuntarily, until I realised it wasn't on the ground but planted on the calf of a man in front of me.

I had never felt anything like this before: not on the Kop, not at Wembley. And it was about to get worse. Behind me, Peter Carney, a 30-year-old fan from Liverpool, was one of hundreds of people now being swept into the packed central pens from the concourse. "We were walking through the tunnel at about 10 to three when, whoosh, this surge came and I was off my feet," he remembers. "I actually entered the stadium with my back to the pitch." Just as Peter thought he would be OK, a crush barrier went down. "I knew there was a gap in the crowd, which was odd - it was like: 'What the f**k's that?' The people pressed against the barrier had fallen as it buckled, the people leaning on their backs fell on them, and a third row went down, too. There was a stack of bodies."

That crush barrier was a few feet to my right, but I didn't see it. Because the light was slowly closing around my head. By now I was gasping for breath, and worried that my neck wasn't moving freely. Within feet of me people were standing dead, bolt upright. Three men had long stopped breathing and were now staring, with a fixed, almost disinterested expression, into the distance. Their faces were bleached white, but turning blue, their lips a cold violet. The only comfort I could find was that thousands of people who were still alive were now shouting for help, screaming, "There are people dead in here!" There were CCTV cameras trained on us. And there were police just a few feet in front of the fence who must have realised that metal crush barriers in our pen were bursting out of the ground.

Unbelievably, at 3pm, the match kicked off. I remember the roar of the crowd around the ground, and the stillness that followed in pen 3 as people gave up screaming for help to save the air in their lungs. By this time my lungs were burning and freezing with alternate breaths. I was paralysed from the neck down. Rival chants were bouncing the length of the ground, and I thought of my brother, watching from the opposite end of the stadium, where I should have been. Two police officers were sharing a joke, nervously, on the cinder track, 10ft away. No one was coming to help.

Behind me, Peter Carney was about to have a near-death experience. "Whenever I see a fish come up to the surface, that's how I must've been," he remembers. "My head was tilted back, gasping for air. Then I lost consciousness. The sky became white cloud, the white cloud became a tunnel shape, and I went down this tunnel. It was like looking down a pipe. It was never-ending. Then I'm looking back at the pens, me in the middle of a perfect circle of people, and heads, and I'm going down, and I'm looking at the top of my head."

Eight feet or so in front of Peter, I was about to have my own moment of reckoning. I had been crushed on that terrace for over half an hour. I was exhausted, and stiff with shock. Incredibly, two people to my left had managed to climb above the crush, and were now crawling on all fours over the shoulders and heads of people around me, to the fence at the front. Unable to move, too exhausted now to shout, I wondered how they had managed to get out. And why it had been decided that I wouldn't.

It was then that I caught the eye of a policeman just the other side of the fence. It was an unmistakable, meaningful moment: because for four or five seconds, across the heads of scores of people, we looked each other in the eye.

I lost him when I mouthed the words, "Help us." He smiled to himself and shook his head at me, and walked on, a little uncertainly.

At that point I thought: "We've been left to die." Many people already had. People bigger than me, smaller than me, and smarter than me were gone. Now it was my turn. Fifty seconds, my brain was telling me: you've got 50 seconds left. I don't know where the figure came from, but there wasn't a moment of doubt in my mind: just a calm, orderly voice telling me to hurry up and take in the final minute of my life. As the seconds ticked down to 45, 40, 35, my lungs began to falter. I screwed up every ounce of strength left in my body - to lever myself into the air, climb on to someone's shoulders, escape. But as I heaved and strained, my body wouldn't move an inch. Those pressed tight around me were heavy, some were unconscious; others were gibbering, trying to black out what was happening.

I counted down to 20 seconds, and then at 15, or 14, I gave up. At 10 seconds, nine, eight, I floated away for a moment, briefly euphoric. Then I settled into my body, opened my mouth towards the sky and sucked what I could out of it. And then I closed my eyes. Five seconds later, they opened. The sky was still blue. And the police had finally opened the gate in the fence and were swearing at us. And I had survived.

The people on the Leppings Lane who didn't survive were daughters, husbands, sisters, sons. The oldest victim was 67, the youngest a 10-year-old boy, the cousin of a then eight-year-old Steven Gerrard. Many of them died standing up, of traumatic asphyxia. Others, in their last moments, were borne across the pitch on advertising hoardings, towards ambulances that never came. Some of the dead had lost their footing in the crush and had been trampled. Others, unfortunate to be leaning against the crush barriers, were killed by a weight on their chest equivalent to a small car.