PERHAPS the ultimate horror of Heysel is that the disaster could so easily have been prevented. As somebody who was there in 1985, I remember all too vividly the sudden gaping space on the terrace where so many Juventus fans had stood and would never stand again.

I remember, too, the endless calls over the loudspeakers for what transpired to be relatives of the 39 dead at the stadium. I remember the photographer Eamonn McCabe below the press box, clenching and unclenching his fists to indicate 20 or so before dragging a finger across his throat to tell us these poor people were dead.

The day after the disaster I was one of seven journalists summoned to meet Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street, where she said, incontestably, how sad it was that one group of supporters could not stand beside another without such a thing happening.

I believe that what happened in Rome a year earlier had much to do with the outrage. That evening Liverpool had beaten Roma on penalties in the final of the European Cup of 1984. Almost as soon as the Liverpool fans came out of the Olympic stadium they were viciously assaulted by brutal young Roma supporters with iron bars and other weapons.

It should be stressed that this was not simply because Liverpool had won in such a contentious way. The appalled Roman press reported next day that the hooligans had stowed weapons in their cars before the game and rushed out to collect them after the final whistle. One of the most extraordinary aspects of this violence was that fans of Lazio, bitter foes of Roma, pushed weapons into the hands of Liverpool supporters, urging them to defend themselves.

For anybody who knows Italy, Rome and Turin might just as well be two foreign countries that both detest each other. But for those Liverpool fans at Heysel, Italians were simply Italians, wherever they might come from.

That Heysel was ever chosen for the game was a shocking commentary on the folly of Uefa and the idleness of its team that was meant to inspect the stadium. The word was that the day they came, it was very cold, and that they scarcely bothered to emerge from the warmth to see what should have been obvious to them — that this stadium was not fit to stage a game of such magnitude.

Next there was the question of ticket allocation. The Belgian football authorities failed to realise that any tickets on sale in Belgium were likely to be snapped up by Italian immigrant workers, who were so numerous. This surely happened, and the consequence was that the Italian fans standing next to Liverpool’s on that terrace were not regular, hardcore supporters who followed Juventus, but mostly defenceless, peaceful families.

The appalling state of the stadium made matters worse, enabling Liverpool fans to crawl in under the surrounding wire and crowd that terracing. Those experienced in hooligan behaviour have said there was no murderous intent in the eventual charges by the Liverpool thugs, and that it was the kind of thing that happened frequently at many a ground, but between rival fans, capable of fighting their corner. The Italians who were rushed off the terraces to be crushed against the concrete walls had no such experience and no such capability.

But there was a good quarter-hour after the first surge by Liverpool fans in which there was a hiatus. There is little doubt that the English police, so much more experienced in such situations, would have stormed in and quelled the riot, but Belgian police did nothing of the sort. And when a platoon of them eventually arrived, their commander lined them up and inspected them.

Should the game have been played? The overriding factor was plainly fear that if it was stopped, riots could ensue. Juventus, for what it was worth, won it with a penalty for a cynical foul that occurred just outside the box.

Like misguided lambs, the Football Association rushed to the slaughter, prostrating themselves before Uefa, willingly allowing English clubs to be excluded from European competitions for the next five years.

This never seemed fair to me. Not fair to English football, not even fair to Liverpool as a tarnished city. A week earlier, in Rotterdam, on the occasion of the European Cup Winners’ Cup final, I saw Everton’s supporters behave themselves almost impeccably. The one misdemeanour I noticed was when an Everton fan walked out of a cafe without paying the bill.

Everton, League Champions that season, were thus denied the chance to compete in the next European Cup. The five-year exclusion had a deeply negative, stagnating affect on our football; always prone to isolationism, it was forced into an isolation that was far from splendid, excluded from the process of cross-fertilisation that European competition will provide.

Yet I still believe the Heysel disaster could and should have been avoided.

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