Deep Down Inside
I hate Manchester United. I just do. It’s part and parcel of bleeding Liverpool red, nothing I can do about it except go with the flow of my club. But would I ever go into vehicular manslaughter territory? Frankly I don’t think so, but don’t ask Steven Cohen this question, or else you’ll be forced to listen to a litany of tired eighties era rants of how all Liverpool fans are responsible for Hillsborough. I won’t go in depth into the issue, except to say that a government panel at the time cleared Liverpool supporters of any contribution to the tragedy. Cohen though won’t have any of that by dismissing the famed Taylor Report. He doesn’t give any specific reasons for dismissing it, but we are supposed to just accept that any finding by the government at that time bears no credibility.
Fine, but what is truly disturbing about this incident is how an American broadcaster on the sport of soccer has taken a contrarian view when the body of evidence shows his opinion to be wholly unsupportable. And in effect he has taken the credibility of American soccer with him. There are now boycotts and movements in trying to remove him from the air. I unconditionally do NOT support such moves, they only create a quagmire into which the sport never really recovers from and they don’t work. But when Cohen takes a viewpoint that in any European football market would be laughed and mocked, it only highlights the status of American soccer as the idiot jackass cousin at a family funeral. While Steven Cohen may not speak for me, the dynamics of media will result in the world shaking their heads and saying, “How typical an American getting it wrong.”. And for this the soccer community in this country owes you a great well done Mr. Cohen.
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Farbeit for me to defend Cohen, but I don’t know that anyone truly accepts the Taylor report in its entirety because of the politics behind it, the revisions between the Interim Report and the Final Report, and the selective use of witness reports. Sans a soapbox, my personal opinion is that whichever version of the Taylor that you read, it is impossible not to find fault with the methodology. The Initial Report blamed the police, the Final was mostly a term paper on stadia construction and revisionist architecture, and neither discussed the entirety of the evidence before reaching a conclusion. Both read as though the concluding portions were written first.
It is a tragedy that lives were lost. The culture of English hooliganism in the years preceding Hillsborough created a police attitude of crowd control rather than crowd safety. The specific architecture of the stadium left bottlenecks and pinchpoints that couldn’t handle an overflow crowd. Poor logistics outside the stadium increased flow through one gate. Thousands of people without tickets or with fake ones forced their way into the standing room only terraces. Neither Taylor version ascribes blame to all of the contributing elements, and thus it is flawed. But Cohen is certainly not the best messenger to communicate that thought.
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:14 pm
Anti-Scouse the previous year the police closed off certain pens to control overflowing and reduce congestion. The year the tragedy happened no such measures were taken. The total number of people in the terraces in no way exceeded the number of people the terrace could hold. These are two primary and incontrovertible facts within the Taylor report. In fact only this year the Home office announced they may reopen the case to really give a definitive answers to the questions that still linger. I am not trying to become a homer here, so I don’t want to become rah rah Liverpool fan guy here. Trying to be objective here when I soooo don’t want to. What I do feel comfortable in saying is the credibility of soccer commentary in America takes a hit here.
June 4th, 2009 at 11:07 am
I don’t believe that American soccer commentary has ever been taken seriously and seldom rises above embarrassing. Such luminaries as Julie Foudy, Erik Wynalda and Shaka Hislop are underwhelming at best, and it doesn’t take much searching to find petitions for the removal of Tommy Smyth and his onion bag (ok, I know he’s Irish but somehow he’s the voice of ESPN).
As for the incontrovertible facts, well, they are controverted through a great deal of testimony that was discounted. I suppose a disection of the various Taylor reports is beyond this scope, but several witness accounts at a minimum established that there was insufficient space in the Liverpool end (the smaller end of the stadium, a reversal from the identical fixture the year preceding) for the numbers that were entering that gate. The end goal of the Taylor report was to find something that can be remedied, and that was accomplished at the expense of the Terraces (a good trade IMO).
And believe me, I’d love to scream that the scousers were to blame. But that doesn’t fix anything, and I don’t really think that. But I don’t believe that the mob mentality of English football preceding the event (and thus the individuals involved) wasn’t a contributing factor either.
As for Cohen, while I think he’s a dope in many cases, I’d rather have fifty biased semiknowledgeable pundits than zero.
June 4th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Yes and the reason there was insufficient space in the Leppings Lane end was the side pens were not opened like the year before and if you watch the video of the carnage there is clearly room in the side terraces.
What Cohen is trying to establish is regardless of whether or not the police were efficient and responsible in controlling the crowd this tragedy would have happened because it’s Liverpool. As for the lack of credible commentary in the US, I wholeheartedly agree, absolutely on the money. So having Cohen spout off without any credible foundation to base his opinion or rant on only exacerbates the deficiencies. While the rest of the footballing world can look at Hillsborough soberly, objectively, and with detail. In the US we basically get The Sun part II. How is that any sort of tradeoff?