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Spot on.

Secret files on the Hillsborough disaster could be made public 10 years early after a request from the home secretary. Jacqui Smith has asked South Yorkshire Police to release the documents, which contain detailed evidence of what happened during the tragedy in 1989. It could help families of the 96 victims who want a new inquiry. Ms Smith has met South Yorkshire Chief Constable Meredydd Hughes to discuss the records. Joan Traynor, 76, who lost her two sons, Christopher, 26, and Kevin, 16, in the disaster, welcomed the move. She said: "At last something might be done and at last there might be a chance that the truth could be out. "After years of campaigning I feel like something might happen. We have felt nothing but injustice and the only way we can get justice for our loved ones is if these files are made public and a fresh inquiry is opened." Inquest ruling The files contain evidence from the police, local council and the ambulance service. Documents like this are usually not made public for 30 years, but the home secretary has intervened two decades after the disaster. Evidence was examined during the original inquest, in which the coroner ruled all victims had sustained their fatal injuries by 3.15pm, based on advice from pathologists. As a result, he did not hear any evidence of what happened after that point - but many bereaved families believe their loved ones could have still been alive and they want a fresh inquiry. Culture secretary Andy Burnham was heckled as campaigners shouted "Justice for the 96" at the Hillsborough memorial service on Wednesday. Following the service, he called for "full disclosure" of all evidence on the Hillsborough disaster. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/8006744.stm

OTTAWA, April 18 (Reuters) - American George Gillett is seeking a partner willing to invest $400 million into a sporting empire that includes Liverpool soccer club and the Montreal Canadiens NHL team, a newspaper said on Saturday. The French-language La Presse, citing sources involved with the proposed sale of the Canadiens, said such an investment would enable the financially-pressed businessman to hold on to the teams. La Presse said Gillett had proposed to several business executives that they invest $400 million and become a junior partner, but had generated little interest so far. Gillett said last month that he had hired a team of advisors to look at his assets and denied media reports he wanted to sell some of them. "My family and I regard this possibility as the last resort. We are a lot more interested in some kind of (business) association than in the sale of the Montreal Canadiens or one of our other enterprises," Gillett told the newspaper on Friday. Gillett owns 80.1 percent of the Canadiens and 50 percent of five-times European champions Liverpool. Canadian media last week said would-be buyers were being asked to submit formal offers for the Canadiens and several groups had signed confidentiality agreements with the Bank of Montreal's investment banking arm. Gillett declined to comment on the reports, saying the banking arm had yet to complete its work. http://football.uk.reuters.com/uk/news/N18...hp?rpc=401&

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Benitez and Ferguson: Now it's all-out warfare Ferguson ramps up the hostilities with Benitez in extraordinary verbal assault By Ian Herbert The task in hand should have been Everton at Wembley in tomorrow's FA Cup semi-final, but Sir Alex Ferguson instead chose to escalate his increasingly intemperate verbal warfare with the Liverpool manager, Rafael Benitez, yesterday, accusing him of arrogance, a lack of humility and being "beyond the pale" in his disrespectful conduct towards other managers. Though as yet the Premier League has no plans to intervene in the war of words between the two men, it will soon have to do so, if this goes on. Ferguson is clearly spoiling for a fight at the slightest opportunity and the flimsiness of his latest "evidence" against Benitez – what he and his old friend Sam Allardyce, the Blackburn Rovers manager, perceive as a "game-over" gesture after Fernando Torres scored his second goal against Rovers at Anfield last Saturday – reveals as much. "There's one thing with his arrogance that he showed that you can't forgive and that is his contempt for Sam Allardyce last week when Liverpool scored their second goal," Ferguson said. "It was absolute contempt. I don't think Sam Allardyce deserved that. A guy who has worked so hard... looking after young managers and players [and who was] playing with a team that was weakened. I don't think any other Liverpool manager would ever have done that. But he is beyond the pale." Allardyce, whose loathing of Benitez prompted his own sarcastic attacking on his "wingeing" before their Anfield match, had already weighed in before Ferguson spoke yesterday. "I'd expect better and however we compete and pit our wits against each other, I don't think there's any need for that," he said of the so-called gesture. "Without having the opportunity to speak to him, I have to make it clear what I feel about it. He probably was avoiding me but that shows you the measure of the man." But while Allardyce says he has spent the week watching "three or four replays" of the incident, close examination of it reveals Benitez to have been doing little more than smiling. He chose not to enter the spat yesterday but the view from Liverpool is that a positive gesture the manager made to midfielder Xabi Alonso at the moment in question – the Spaniard having ignored his own instructions and still set up the Torres goal – has been mistaken for something more malign. Ferguson, whose press secretary attempted to move the conversation on as the attack on Benitez persisted, insisted he and Allardyce had not concocted the attack between them. "No," Ferguson said, when asked if they had discussed it. "I saw it and I'm surprised nobody picked it up actually." However, the Scot used it as a launch pad for the latest of a series of attacks on Benitez, which have been pouring forth with mounting venom ever since the Spaniard's now legendary "facts" attack on the Scot at Liverpool's Melwood training ground in January. "He's never done that [gestured in the dugout] to me and never had a chance," Ferguson added yesterday. "I think you should respect a manager. I don't think you'd ever get me doing something like that – you won't. You have to have humility." The first hint yesterday that Ferguson had Benitez in his sights came with a passing reference to the Spaniard's claim last season that Everton were a "small club". "That just points to his arrogance but David Moyes is building a big club, the evidence is there." Benitez should have expected all this when he began this war of words. Ferguson initially responded by tartly suggesting that Benitez might be suffering psychological problems. That was before the critical factor in this saga: Liverpool's challenge to United's once virtually unassailable League position which, after the Reds' 4-1 win at Old Trafford last month now sees them only a point behind with a game more played. "I don't know what he does in his spare time but he's certainly not using it in the right way," was the last jibe yesterday at the Liverpool manager. Watching videos of Premier League opposition from his mountainous library, is the answer. http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/footbal...re-1670323.html

I saw all this clearly at the match. Before the free kick was taken which led to the second goal Rafa was shouting and gesticulating to Xabi, trying to tell him how to take the free kick. Xabi obviously delivered it differently to how Rafa wanted and the gesture and smile was a sort of "fair enough, you were right" thing. As if Rafa would be saying game over at that stage. Allerdyce is a soft c*nt but it's brilliant to see an obviously rattled Ferguson getting involved.

Powell is one disingenuous b*stard. He wrote about "a charge by ticket-less fans to gain access" for which no evidence exists outside his own twisted tory mind.

That first game after Hillsborough at Goodison was a help. I think it was at that game where they completed the linked scarfs between the two grounds but I was in bits so I'm not certain. As for Duckenfield, I couldn't hate him more.

Read the Taylor Report Powell you c*nt: Were Fans Without Tickets a Major Factor in the Build-Up? 200. It has become a fact of football life that fans do turn up at all-ticket matches without tickets. It is not possible to give an accurate figure or even a reliable estimate of the number without tickets on 15 April. Police estimates varied from about 200 to about 2,000. There were certainly frequent requests for tickets or "spares" during the hours before the build-up. Many of those warned off by the police were seen to return to the area. Some were hanging about on the bridge. Again, however, the police witnesses who most impressed me did not consider the number of ticketless fans to be inordinately large. This accords with two other sources of evidence. 201. First, there was a wide range of witnesses who observed inside the ground that the Liverpool end was at a late stage well below capacity save for pens 3 and 4. The north stand still had many empty seats and the wing pens were sparse. The match being a sell-out, there were clearly many ticket holders to come and they could account for the large crowd still outside the turnstiles. Had the Liverpool accommodation been full by 2.40 pm, one could have inferred that most or much of the large crowd outside lacked tickets. 202. Secondly, such figures as are available from the Club's electronic monitoring system and from analyses by the HSE suggest that no great number entered without tickets. They show that the number who passed through turnstiles A to G plus those who entered through gate C roughly equalled the terrace capacity figure of 10,100 for which tickets had been sold. The Club's record showed 7,038 passed through turnstiles A to G. However, the counting mechanism on turnstile G was defective, so the HSE did a study using the video film and projecting figures from the other turnstiles. This gave an assessment of 7,494, with a maximum of 7,644 passing through A to G. Again, using the video, the HSE assessed the number who entered the ground whilst gate C was open at 2,240 with a maximum of 2,480. Accordingly, the HSE's best estimate of the total entering through gate C and turnstiles A to G was 9,734 with a maximum of 10,124.1 recognise that these can only be rough checks because, for example, some with terrace tickets were allowed through turnstiles 1 to 16 and there would be other similar factors which have not formed part of the assessment. Nevertheless, the figures do suggest that there was not a very significant body of ticketless fans in the crowd which built up.

A great article by Lawton in the Independent today: James Lawton: I was a witness to the needless death of 96 football fans. The memory still sickens me On the 20th anniversary of tragedy at Hillsborough, The Independent's chief sports writer explains why the police have a case to answer It never goes away. The waste of it, the dereliction of duty, the callousness implicit in the cheap branding of innocent people who died so unnecessarily and the cover-up which started when Mrs Thatcher brought flowers the following morning – and bought the stories so carefully edited by the men who had failed so abjectly to protect 96 lives. The deepest horror, 20 years on, is still the one that came, with sickening clarity even for someone untrained in policing or public safety, before a single life was lost. You had only to stand outside the crush of the Leppings Lane end – as I did 20 minutes or so before the start of the game – to know that so many lives were in terrible danger and that, inevitably, some would be lost. Maybe, worst of all, was the sense that nobody seemed to care. A group of policemen and women, without deployment, stood in a circle, talking among themselves. It was surreal, a nightmare from which there could be no awakening. A mounted policeman tried to wheel, unsuccessfully, in space that was being filled more tightly with every second as more people were pressed down on the gate, and the flash of panic across his face was, you knew the moment you saw it, something you would never forget. It told you that in that hellish side of a football ground no one's safety could be guaranteed. There was no control, no leadership, no apparent awareness of the odds rising so swiftly, so inexorably, against the possibility of averting a tragedy. Now, after all the research and irrefutable evidence and documentation, the public knows, if they care to, the anatomy of this tragedy. They know of the failures of the police, their deceits, their refusal to officially acknowledge any direct responsibility for what happened, and the lack of success in the private prosecution of the commander who was allowed to retire, without the disciplinary action recommended by the official Taylor report, on grounds of ill-health and on a full pension – shortly before taking a job as secretary of his local golf club. But if such facts can still engender rage, if the refusal of home secretaries and police authorities to say, yes, there was a terrible negligence, and we need to say sorry to all those who lost loved ones, can only be seen as shockingly insensitive cruelties, there is also a more personal angst for anyone who happened to be there. If you knew it was going to happen, how could you simply take the advice of the policewoman and walk to the other side of the ground, where the Nottingham Forest fans had not been herded into dangerously overcrowded places, then walk into the press box and sit next to a colleague and point to the Leppings Lane end and say, "People are going to die over there"? No, you were as powerless as so many of the leaderless policemen and the dedicated ambulance drivers who, before it was too late, were denied access to the football pitch that had become a killing field. But maybe you could have screamed to the heavens against this horror created by insufficient care and professionalism. Instead, you tried to do your job as a reporter. You went down on to the field and saw the pathetic attempts to make stretchers of advertising hoardings. You said to yourself that you could indeed do what was urged upon you by one tear-stained man... "tell the world what really happened... everyone who has died here deserves that". Down the years you tried to be faithful to that command. You drove to Liverpool to give evidence to the West Midlands Police who were conducting an "independent" inquiry. You went into the witness box in Leeds Crown Court in the private prosecution but you felt useless then because all you could really say was that you knew it was going to happen, and if you knew why didn't the police know, and why didn't they react professionally. Why were they so inert? Why were stories planted in The Sun that drunken fans robbed the dead and urinated on first-aid workers, stories that made you sick in the stomach if you had been out on the field and seen the desperate, untutored efforts to help the dead and the dying. While the ambulances were held up by police because a "riot" was going on, those makeshift stretchers were made and there were beseeching attempts at mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. In the absence of any form of official apology, which is the last scandal of Hillsborough, the steady seepage of truth is no doubt a small source of comfort to the bereaved. The worst of the lies have been held up to the light and been ridiculed. But this does nothing to lessen the need for that apology. Closure cannot come without it because it is one thing to know what happened, and see that it is plain to all dispassionate witnesses, and quite another to wait so long for such a concession from those who out of self-interest tried hardest to deny it. In so many ways, those who have argued most passionately for the dead of Hillsborough have been vindicated. They have kept faith with the memory of their loved ones and they have exposed terrible injustice. All that is left is the need for a breath of atonement. Twenty years is long enough to wait but then if you were there and powerless it is easy to understand why some will keep up their hopes until the day they die. http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/footbal...me-1668852.html

Never forgotten YNWA JFT96

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Nine of them were won by Drogba. http://www.uefa.com/competitions/ucl/fixtu.../report=st.html

Chelsea had 33 free kicks to our 17. Diving c*nts.

I've been to a couple and just paid on the gate.

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Nonsense.

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It's our "familiar Achilles heel" according to the BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/europe/7977013.stm

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Just back from thew game in a foul mood but that brought a smile to my face.

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