96 Spaces In The World

It's easy to get caught up in the importance of the former – and football is hugely important to us all – but it's also easy to confuse it with the real importance of the latter.

Because we love it, and because it was loved by those who lost their lives, football goes on; it continued after Munich, and Ibrox, and Bradford, and Heysel, and Hillsborough; as well as the world's other football-related disasters: Kaizer Chiefs v Orlando Pirates, Spartak Moscow v Haarlem, Peru v Argentina. Football endures, but it never forgets. However, with the hundreds of fans crushed to death in stadia all over the world prior to 1989, in places as far-flung as Argentina, Russia and Nepal, it seems it took Hillsborough to finally learn some lessons.

In many ways I feel unqualified to speak of Hillsborough – I wasn't there, and at the time I didn't know anyone who was (although I now do). I wasn't directly affected by the tragedy, and yet, like all Liverpool fans all over the world, I felt it on a personal level.

April 1989 was an important, exciting time in my life. Just days before the tragedy I had turned 18, and passed my driving test. With the world opening up to me, I thought about all the things I could now do. With the FA Cup semi-final looming, I thought I could fulfil a long-held ambition and drive myself to my first game.

Of course, in my naivety it never occurred to me that the match would have long-since been sold out. But the intention was there. That it could have been my first game made it hit home a little more. I could have been one of those going to a game from which, little did anyone know at the time, the chances of not returning from were 200-1.

I can still picture the route I drove as I listened to the match on the radio – or the first six minutes of the match, before chaos brought it to a swift conclusion. I was on my way home, and once there I made straight for the television, to watch in horror as the reality of what was taking place came flooding into the living room. I cried a lot that day, and in the weeks that followed. And that was just me, a Liverpool fan in another part of the country, detached from the real grief.

In 1994 I started playing for a football team that contained a Liverpool season ticket holder, Adie, and we became good friends, going to games together, home and away, regularly from that point onwards. He had been at Hillsborough (and Heysel), and yet had he been one of those who had perished in Sheffield, I'd never have known him; not only that, but his name would have meant no more to me than any of the 96 who lost their lives.

That's one of the strangest parts of life: the coincidental interactions and events that take place and that, had they not, we'd be none the wiser. There's a space in the world where once existed 96 people; it's not just their nearest and dearest who have missed them since that day – although they are the ones aware of the fact. It is all the unmade friendships denied by cruel twists of fate, all the encounters that would have taken place; all the Reds that other Reds would have met at matches from that day onwards – except, because of events on the 15th April 1989, they weren't there.

Obviously you will not realise it, but some of you will have lost your future best friend that day, maybe even your future husband or wife. You lost future colleagues at work, or university, or in your football team or rock group. You lost the person who, otherwise, would be sitting next to you at Anfield.

Looking through the list of the 96 now, I'm shocked by the ages of the victims. So many were aged 15, 16, 17, 18 – at the same stage of life as I had been. All the things I've gone on to do with my life, good and bad, that I had no idea awaited me half my lifetime ago. Who knows what awaited those young boys and girls?

As a father, it breaks my heart to look through the list of those who died and see a boy like Jon-Paul Gilhooley, just ten years old at the time. Anything involving the death of a child reduces me to jelly. It is impossible to not empathise. Then there are those families lost more than one family member: the Harrisons, the Hewitts, the Howards, the Traynors, the Hicks.

Hillsborough hasn't 'ended'. Even now, all these years later, Anne Williams, who lost her son Kevin in the tragedy, is fighting legal battles, and setting up Hope for Hillsborough in the desire to achieve the justice she and others crave.

Despite writing regularly about the club, I've never claimed to be a 'super fan'. I support Liverpool for what the team means to me; not what anyone thinks it should mean to me, and not to copy what it means to anyone else. I've always been happy to admit that others are far more committed than I am, although I care deeply in my own way. I wasn't at Hillsborough, and only partly understand what it means to those who were; I will not pretend otherwise.

Having been at the game on April 15th 1989, my friend Adie is part of an unenviable group: the kind you wished didn't exist, for the sake of its members. So I always knew that, however dedicated I became, I could never be as deeply affected by all the issues surrounding the club as others.

But with a forum to express my views, it would be remiss of me to not take this chance to remind people of what was lost that day; and to think of the 96 people who exist in the hearts and minds of so many people, but were denied the chance to exist in the hearts and minds of so many more.