Twenty-nine years after their last league title, and with the Hillsborough disaster stitched into the fabric of the club, players and supporters feel a palpable mixture of yearning and pride
Three weeks ago, amid a gripping Premier League title race, Phil Scraton and Margaret Aspinall walked into a room at Melwood, Liverpool’s training ground, to talk to a squad of multimillionaire footballers about the 30th anniversary of the Hillsborough tragedy. Scraton turned 70 this Friday and, despite his vast experience of life and injustice, of joy and horror, he felt anxious. His support of Liverpool stretches over 60 years. From the days of Billy Liddell, a star when the club were still in the old second division, to Liverpool’s domination of English football under Bill Shankly, Bob Paisley and Joe Fagan, and throughout the current 29-year wait for another league title, Scraton has been a fan.
In the silence he looked at the small sea of faces and picked out players he reveres now, from Mo Salah and Virgil van Dijk to Andy Robertson and Trent Alexander-Arnold. Scraton was unsure how they would react to him remembering a catastrophe that occurred before any of that quartet was born. His work as an academic and criminologist, as the man who did more than anyone to expose the institutional deceit that hid the truth of why 96 Liverpool fans died at Hillsborough, suddenly mattered little. Scraton wondered if this group of title-chasing footballers might yawn or sigh.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2vDCZsM
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