Running towards the centre circle I became aware of two things an old man gazing out from the centre of the grandstand, standing stock-still, looking out towards me, just before blazing timbers fell and entombed him. I became wedged against the wall, until a stranger - whose face I never saw - hauled me over. The crowd surged away from the seat of the fire, which was moving towards us at speed, its energy accelerated by the stadium roof, which turned the grandstand into an oven. This was before the fences - which would truncate so many lives at Hillsborough a few years later - had been erected to foil hooligans. I was standing in what was known as 'the Paddock' - a standing area beneath the grandstand roof, which ran around the edge of the seating blocks.Īt the edge of the pitch there was, thank God, simply a 4ft-high stonewashed brick wall. But I remember with bitter clarity the exact moment when the jokes and banter turned sour, when the bonhomie turned to panic, when grown men started climbing over others to escape the smoke. Some people sang, never imagining what was about to unfold, "burn it down, burn it down". I was at the opposite end of the grandstand from where the smoke initially appeared.Īt first spectators assumed it was a smoke bomb.
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