Hillsborough: the disaster that changed football's landscape for good | Audio: Tony Evans recalls the nightmare | Graphic: how the tragedy unfolded | Police commander remaining silent | Trevor Hicks: 20 years of grief | How The Times reported events

A SEA of flowers flooded the pitch at Anfield and scarves drenched the Kop. Players sat with the dying in hospital wards and representatives of Kenny Dalglish’s squad went to every funeral. At the centre of the memorial at the Shankly Gates burns an eternal flame. But such things can only ever be balm for the bereaved. There is no healing for their pain.

What makes life harder, still, for families of the 96 Liverpool fans who died because of what happened at Hillsborough on April 15, 1989, is a sense that the legal process failed them. The Taylor Report blamed authorities — mainly South Yorkshire police — for mistakes leading to the fatal crush at the Leppings Lane end of the stadium (Taylor called the police’s failure to cut access to pens already overfilled with supporters after opening an exit gate to allow in 2,000 fans “a blunder of the first magnitude”). Yet no individual or public body has been held to account in law. A public inquest, the longest in British history, returned a verdict of accidental death instead of the one hoped for by victims’ relatives, that of unlawful killing. In a documentary to be aired on The History Channel on Wednesday, Hillsborough’s 20th anniversary, former players throw their weight behind calls for a fresh inquest.

Anne Williams, who lost her 15-year-old son, Kevin, recently had a case rejected by the European Court of Human Rights and is now pursuing the attorney-general for a new inquest. She is challenging a ruling that limited the scope of original investigations: that those who died did so by 3.15pm. Eyewitness evidence suggests many victims were still alive after 3.15pm and a number might have survived had more ambulances been allowed into the ground.

John Aldridge says in the documentary: “Till the day you die, you have got to get an answer, you’ve got to keep on banging whatever drums are in front of you, to keep it going. Because it should never have happened, it’s as easy as that.

“You go on a lovely April day to watch the semi-final of the FA Cup and your loved ones don’t come home. I’ll tell you what: if that happened to my son, I would still be unearthing whatever I can to find some answers, yeah, big time. Football died that day in a certain way. Football as we knew it. Look at the stadiums now, which are fantastic, but football for that generation just stopped, and we’ve got a different type of football now. It takes a lot for me to be emotional but that night I was inconsolable. I just broke down the enormity of what had gone on.”

Bruce Grobbelaar, still haunted by fans crying for help and seeing faces pinned against the fence behind his goal, argues: “Everything points to a policing mistake, and yet everyone wants to blame the fans. Nobody has ever held up their hands and said, ‘I’m sorry, I was to blame’. Nobody has.”

Gary Ablett, the former Liverpool defender now in charge of the club’s youth academy, says: “People haven’t been held accountable and, you know, possibly shielded from the families, from people seeking the truth. So I am not sure we will ever have closure.”

Dalglish concludes: “It’s something everybody wished had never happened but I think it’s also something that nobody should forget.” Dalglish, then manager of Liverpool, was deeply traumatised by Hillsborough and has never discussed the disaster publicly until now. He argues that police and Football Association representatives should have delayed the kick-off of the match, between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, as a crush built outside the stadium and on the terraces leading up to 3pm. The match was abandoned after six minutes when it was finally realised a tragedy was unfolding. “The easiest thing to do is just put the kick-off back a bit. That’s no problem for anybody,” Dalglish says.

“If the police are talking to the FA and the FA have got to make that call, there wouldn’t have been any resentment or disagreement with the people in the dressing room. Neither Brian Clough, God rest him, or ourselves certainly.

“The punters were superb. I mean, they helped the police as much as anything else. It was their friends, it was their supporters, it was their football club that was in trouble.”

On Wednesday Dalglish will give a reading at a service held at Anfield attended by the current Liverpool squad, including Steven Gerrard whose cousin, Jon-Paul Gilhooley, who died aged 10, was Hillsborough’s youngest victim. Gerrard said: “I remember going to bed that night, praying that a member of our family hadn’t been involved. Unfortunately, we got the dreaded knock on the door the next day to say had died.”

Aldridge will never forget the hospital visits. “I was asking how many of these people were going to come out of comas. He said, ‘Bit by bit, it’s good, it’s okay. There’s a young lad there, can you go over and say a few words in his ear?’ I went over and I said, ‘John Aldridge here. When you are up and you come to Anfield next time, we’ll give you a shirt, we’ll make a fuss of you and we’ll have a great day’.

“I went back to the doctor and I said, ‘So when do you expect the young lad to come out of his coma?’ He said, ‘They’re switching his life-support machine off this afternoon’. It absolutely ripped me insides out.”