Enduring Tragedy: Liverpool’s ‘Not Again’ Sentiment, by Ian Herbert

There was an enormous silence on Tuesday after day broke on the place where all hell had let loose.

The preservation of the crime scene had delayed the post-parade clean-up, so the beer cans, the wine bottles, the red confetti and the cheap little ‘Champions’ flags still littered the streets around the place where a vehicle was driven into Liverpool fans. Reminders of the joy that came before the horror.

The desolation was more understated, yet no less vivid, out under leaden skies on Queens Drive, a few miles from the centre of town — always part of the open-top-bus parade route, where generations of people have hung out flags, posters and bunting and shinned up lampposts over the years.

It was near this thoroughfare’s junction with Utting Avenue that Phil Thompson jumped off Liverpool’s open-top bus in May 1981 and asked the occupants of one of the nearby houses if he could avail himself of their toilet.

‘Upstairs, second on the left,’ came back the swift reply, though by the time Thompson had re-emerged, the bus carrying the club’s European Cup-winning team was disappearing off under a railway bridge. He flagged down a passing ice cream van and asked for a lift. ‘No problem, but you’ll have to climb in through the hatch,’ he was told.

Simpler, gentler times, when the idea of a vehicle running down football supporters and the following morning’s news bulletins incorporating a discussion of ‘hostile vehicle mitigation’ would have been utterly inconceivable.

A professor of ‘urban risk and resilience’ suggested on the BBC on Tuesday morning that some kind of ‘constantly moving’ cordon might be necessary to make trophy parades safe.

Who knows when Liverpool will next stage such a victory tour, but it seems reasonable to assume that such events will never be quite the same again. No more Thommo and the ice cream van.

For the city awaking to the aftermath of an incident which left 65 injured and children seriously hurt, the overwhelming emotion was simply, ‘Not again’. Part of Liverpool’s sadness seemed to reside in the familiarity of shocking scenes at what should have been a great football occasion.

Tom Sutherland, a supporter walking on Liverpool’s Strand, near the scene of Monday’s catastrophe, wished there had been no need for the reminder, provided by Sir Kenny Dalglish, that no one ever ‘walks alone’ in Liverpool. ‘We’re all pulling together again and everyone can take strength from that,’ he tells me. ‘But we’ve been here too often before. The morning after, the week after, the year after some terrible thing. We’ve had to live with too much of this.’

He’s talking about events at Hillsborough in April 1989, of course. Though by a grim coincidence, Monday evening’s events also came ahead of Thursday’s 40th anniversary of the Heysel Disaster, which killed 39 mainly Italian supporters who were in the Belgian capital to watch Juventus’s European Cup final against Liverpool.

The culpability of a small, violent group of Liverpool fans that night contributed substantially to the sense of this city’s devastation in the aftermath.

Both those tragedies are remembered at Anfield. Two red scarves were tied on Tuesday to the small beech tree at the stadium’s Hillsborough memorial, where mementos have been placed also marking the 20th league title that the fans who died at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground never lived to see. Plans for a new memorial to the 39 who died at Heysel have also been announced by Liverpool, to coincide with this week’s anniversary.

‘Yes, we at this club have known too much tragedy,’ says Dave Higginson, near the spot on the stadium’s ‘Champions Wall’ where the number of league titles now registers 20. ‘Not this. Not at this time.’

In nearby Coningsby Road, where a mural of Virgil van Dijk adorns a gable-end wall, a group of young people speak of Monday’s celebration being something they’d waited all their lives to see. ‘The reason so many were here was that we didn’t get the chance in the Covid season,’ says one of them, Liam.

Down in the city, the fragments of nightmarish memory on the morning after the night before included the revving of the engine of the Ford Galaxy which was used to wreak havoc, the driver incessantly sounding the horn and the sight of a woman lodged under the vehicle as the car was being besieged.

There was the frantic struggle to get out of the city on Monday night. A mass panic to get away from the scene made it difficult to reach buses, some of which were running half-empty for a time.

Crowds poured up towards the Mersey Tunnel as relatives drove around trying to pick them up. Hundreds queued for ferries back to the Wirral, though that service struggled to deal with the numbers.

It’s a measure of the way that terror forms part of our landscape that one woman standing close to the spot where the car ran amok on Monday had also been caught up in the 2017 attack on Barcelona’s Las Ramblas, when a van was driven into pedestrians. Her boyfriend, who was with her for Liverpool’s parade, had himself been caught up in the Manchester Arena attack, in the same year.

The forensic investigation of the vehicle is only one part of the challenge for the authorities. At an impromptu press conference for those of us standing near the crime scene at 10.30am, Liverpool Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram discussed the importance of identifying the driver of the vehicle as a white, local man to prevent others using the event to incite racial unrest. ‘The police’s need to do that tells us that social media is a cesspit,’ said Rotheram. ‘That things can run riot.’

There was attempted incitement from the social media swamp, despite everyone’s best efforts. Ant Middleton, a provocateur who spoke at the Reform UK party conference in 2024, tweeted in response to the Merseyside force’s public statements: ‘Do not believe anything that comes from police statements or the msm (mainstream media).’ Such is the world we are in.

For Mark Lawrenson, a five-times title winner with Liverpool, the bewildering modern scale of title celebrations, and of football support more generally, makes everything harder to manage and predict.

‘When we beat Everton in the 1986 FA Cup after taking the league away from them the week before, the two teams flew back together and we did our open-top bus tours together,’ Lawrenson tells me. ‘We were on the first bus, the media were on the second and Everton were on the third. Imagine that today!

‘We live in a strange world where there would be huge crowds for the opening of a plastic bag. I’m just pleased that I was born when I was and played when I did.’

Back in those 1980s days, Liverpool would take the bus up to the old Speke Airport, to get around as many people as possible, travelling at 30mph on some stretches. ‘Because not many people were watching,’ Lawrenson recalls.

The extraordinary contemporary scale of Liverpool FC was evident everywhere on Tuesday. In the hundreds up at the stadium and hundreds more queuing to buy merchandise from the club store in the city centre.

Lawrenson hopes that the events of Monday night do not affect future celebrations of a Liverpool title, though feels that they might. ‘If none of this had happened, we would probably be remembering it as the greatest bus tour ever, with 250,000 people lining the streets,’ he says. ‘With so many people, it only takes one guy to change the entire complexion of an event.’

New details released by the police on Tuesday night suggested the authorities did all they could. Water Street, where the incident occurred, had been closed off to vehicles and was only opened to allow an ambulance to attend to an individual suffering a suspected heart attack.

The man under arrest lives a football pitch’s distance from Queens Drive.

‘Don’t regulate these events. They’re safe,’ says Steve, a fan at Coningsby Road. But it is hard to equate that observation with the desolation and bewilderment down on debris-strewn Water Street.

The vehicle which had been the source of the horror is encased in a blue-and-white pneumatic tent, at the spot where it came to rest. Fans in Liverpool shirts look dazed. The city had hoped such moments were in its past. This will take some getting over.