Adrian Tempany

And The Sun Shines Now – Football’s Darkest Hour

On Saturday 15th April 1989 I was in Blackburn watching my team getting another pasting when news of the FA Cup semi-final over at Hillsborough that there were problems in the crowd. The initial feeling was the scousers fighting each other again, with other murmurings about you cannot take Liverpool fans anywhere.

It was only at half-time and after the game it dawned on the rest of the football fans what was actually in the process of happening at Hillsborough. On that day the author Adrian Tempany was a 16-year-old Liverpool fan and had gone to the Cup semi-final, he survived the carnage that happened on the Leppings Lane stand that day. Like all Liverpool fans that day they had to deal with the trauma, the accusations and pointing the of fingers as 96 fans died.

From that day until April 2016 when the begins of justice began to pull down the pernicious cover up from the establishment towards the Liverpool fans, their families and the City. May 2016 an Inquest Jury found the police guilty of ineptitude, that they were made to watch football in a dilapidated and dangerous football stadium that did not have a safety certificate.

Tempany not only gives a vivid survivor’s account of what happened at Hillsborough, as like many Liverpool fans that day, he was never able to have closure. Through the pages of this book he tries to work out what happened to himself and what has also happened to football and the nation since that day. Since that day we as a society have become more risk averse and everything more is more managed more controlled and our carefree days have gone.

He also examines what happened after the Taylor Report, the findings of which were accepted by the Government and then routinely ignored except for all seater stadia. The miss the fact that Lord Taylor also stated that the fans should not be made to pay through the nose for the modernisation of the game.

Tempany quite rightly insists that football as a sport has profoundly changed because of Hillsborough, football accepted the recommendation of all seater stadia. There was also the Premier League, created in 1992, which was profit and very much money driven around TV rights. There was a rapid and rather shameless switch from the egalitarian football of the past to the Thatcherite market, money driven, survival of the ‘fittest’, which really means the richest.

What Tempany sees is the irony of the Murdoch business that football fans need their fix of the sport just as an addict, how it was his paper that condemned the fans in 1989 and now cannot make enough money from them. He discusses at length the relationship we fans now have between the clubs and their communities and that some have not forgotten the community they came from and are putting something back.

Quite rightly Hillsborough looms large over this book and you cannot help to be moved by Tempany’s writing and the personal perspective that he gives. This is an important book that not only chronicles what happened, well researched, packed with perspectives and speaks the truth that for so long was either hidden or shouted down.… (altro)