Hillsborough: 21 years on

It's 21 years since the horrific events at Hillsborough when 96 Liverpool supporters lost their lives.

Liverpool fans continue the long fight for justice. Every football supporter should back them. And spare a thought today for the people who lost their lives and those that were left behind.

Here's Neil Jones at Goal.com:

Forgetting is far easier than remembering, but forgetting can lead to the same mistakes being made again and again. This is why the 96 Liverpool supporters who lost their lives at Hillsborough should never be allowed to slip from our memory.

Those of us too young to remember the day itself are the lucky ones, anyone forced to watch the tragedy unfold live on Saturday afternoon television or, worse still, those who were present at Hillsborough itself, will never forget FA Cup semi-final day, April 15, 1989.

Today marks the 21st anniversary of the disaster and Liverpool will, as usual, remember those who died in the crush on the Leppings Lane terrace with a memorial service at Anfield.

Have You Ever Been To Liverpool notes that the long fight for justice for the 96 victims continues:

This blog as been going for close on four years and it’s sad that during that time I have had no major progress to write about regarding the ongoing quest for justice for the Hillsborough 96 and their families. I’ve written about what it means to me and the quest for justice but still, after twenty one years, nothing. 

There was an article in yesterday’s Guardian which gave some hope and the documents surrounding the disaster have been released however wheels turn slow. All I can say on this date, when we should always remember, is that hopefully things will change that the justice that everyone craves will be received and some form of closure can happen.

The Tomkins Times has a moving eyewitness account of how events unfolded by Liverpool fan Dr Glyn Phillips:

"As soon as we got in, we knew it was an abnormally packed crowd,” says Dr Phillips, now 55. “We were carried along on our feet by the crowd. We got split up from our mates and Ian and I found ourselves near the front, on the pitch side of a steel crowd barrier."

Dr Phillips had been in lots of packed football terraces but he soon realised the pressure of bodies in this pen was of a different magnitude.

"I’ve been on the Kop many, many times," he recalls, "and I’ve never been in a crush like that before. It was on a completely different scale to my previous experiences. I’d been going on the Kop since the age of 12, for big, big games, derby games, Leeds and Man United games, European games. We always used to go right in the middle behind the goal and I’d enjoy the movement, the surges, the swaying of the crowd. It was part of the fun. But this was abnormal, quite sinister."