Scottish police arrested 28 soccer fans and fined several others last week following wild celebrations sparked by Rangers' first league triumph in 10 years. The gatherings were met with anger by the general public, with Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon saying fans risked the country's progress in containing the novel coronavirus and described the scenes as "infuriating and disgraceful".
Sadly, right here and right now, you can't be there with us. You can't follow us to Parkhead as champions - and the first time we can say we are champions in a decade. Facebook Twitter Linkedin EMail. Start a Conversation. Coronavirus outbreak Covaxin vaccine Cowin vaccine registration Coronavirus live news Corona cases today Covshield vaccine. Follow us on. Living and entertainment iDiva MensXP. Then Jimmy Johnstone scored for Celtic. I stood transfixed as tens of thousands of Celtic supporters leapt in triumph, then surged back and forwards like a bright green giant concertina.
Whole sections rippled in surfing waves down the opposite terracing as they toppled like dominoes and then, uncaring, surged back and forward. Time to go. I was near the top of the terracing and saw many around me leaving, dejected, but able to shuffle down stairway 13, its steps as uneven as ever.
There was no way I was going down there. I would head for the other stairs available to Rangers fans — the safer ones, wider and descending less steeply to the main Edmiston Drive exit. A buzz of desperate hope greeted the award of a final free kick. When Colin Stein scored with the last kick of the game, it was like a bomb going off. The Rangers end exploded. The tens of thousands who had been staring mournfully at the dying embers of the match shot straight up in the air.
When the ball hit the back of the net, those on the dirt exit track tried to push back into the delirious crowd. Those already halfway down the stairway 13 exit would have shuddered to halts as the air split from the roar of celebration above them, grabbing each other, dancing and jumping up and down on the uneven steps.
On the terracing, sober husbands and fathers cheered themselves hoarse. Drunken thugs bayed at the suddenly silent green end of the stadium. Decent Rangers fans hugged each other and whooped hysterically. The whole terrace was alive, turning triumphantly for the exits and a great night ahead. The Celtic fans opposite were dispersing quietly. Victory in the last minute, snatched away in the final seconds. The draw felt like a defeat. Great holes appeared in the green pudding as they melted away safely, ready for a consoling drink and a gradual grudging acceptance that it was not a bad result, to come away from Ibrox with a point.
And still well on course for six league titles in a row. All in all, no disaster. D espite my intention of never ever going near stairway 13 again, I had no choice in the matter. When the final whistle followed the last-minute goal, the chanting crowd swept off the top terracing steps on to the exit track that curved round the top of the Rangers end and I was caught up in it again. I was much more aware of my surroundings than others in the tumultuous frenzy of swaying men, and I quickly pulled my arms up to shoulder height.
Even so, my top half was jammed so tightly on all sides that one of my feet was dragging and scraping along the ground. The crowd slowed almost to a stop. The singing went on. Nobody seemed bothered. If anything, the celebrations were wilder this time, because Celtic had scored so late and Rangers had still stopped them winning. Only a few yards of the high black fence on my left remained before it turned down the side of stairway My fingers closed between two struts.
I jammed my right hand between another two and clung on as if my life depended on it. It did. The pressure of the slow-moving crowd was strong, but not enough to prise me loose. I kept shouting at the heaving mass moving inexorably towards stairway 13, but I made no sense to the few who heard me. I saw that the waterfall of fans spilling from the track on to the stairs was causing a pyramid of people to pile on top of each other less than halfway down.
On the other side of the human mound, on the empty stairs beneath it, matchday police began rushing upwards. They linked arms in a brave and understandable bid to try to halt the carnage, but realised they were increasing the pressure and making things worse, so they broke ranks and began trying to pull folk out of the growing heap. The crowd massed at the top of stairway 13 in front of me became motionless. Then, as the pressure behind them eased, they began to shift, too, along the fenced track to the main exit, and safety.
Their singing and chanting still roared out. They were yards from a massacre and veering away in ignorance of it. As the crowd thinned, I sat down on the top wooden strut of the stairway, unable to move. A St John Ambulanceman in blue and black uniform grasped hold of my arm. I slid down a few stairs on my backside and tried to stand up.
There were blinding lights. The floodlights. A handful of uniformed workers had extricated several bodies. I gazed at them. Some had mouths and eyes wide open. Some were chalk-white, others grey.
His trousers were soaking. I thought I saw small stirrings of life in another chest and pounded again. I pulled a youngster from the jumbled pile of bodies. An ambulanceman was kneeling over two inert men, beating alternately on each chest. He showed me how to do the kiss of life. The deep, wide stairway was a war zone, bodies splayed all down the steps and on the dirt platforms between flights.
The metal rails that divided the stairs into several open passages were mangled, flattened and twisted out of shape, but not broken.
It was those who had followed Rangers who were broken. Police and ambulancemen who had been on the pitch and the terracing were infiltrating the crowd from below, coming up the passageways as walkie-talkie radios at the bottom of stairway 13 squawked for reinforcements. The shriek of sirens outside the ground pierced the trauma.
There were suddenly lots more policemen. The crowd were nearly all gone. There were a few uninjured fans near me, some trying to breathe life into bodies, others lifting people on to stretchers and hurrying them away up the rotten stairs to join the ranks of the injured.
A growing line of corpses was laid out, their faces covered. Only then did the tears come. I t was almost an hour after Stein scored before he or his teammates knew that anyone had died. I lurched down the stairs and into The Stadium bar across the street looking for an impossible taxi.
It was a hive of celebration. Sounds like some people got injured at the game. What end was it? But I could write. Stunned and shaking, I sat down at a typewriter in the offices of the Daily Express in Albion Street and wrote down what I had just seen. I still have the cutting:. Further down some fans had fallen and the crowd was piling on top of them, but it was impossible to slow the crowd up; to let them know they were singing and dancing their way towards a horrible death.
Ten minutes before the fans realised something was wrong and headed for other exits. I did what I could. With brave, weeping policemen and heroic ambulancemen I pounded the chests of those who showed small stirrings of life, in an effort to get their hearts moving.
I pulled youngsters from the jumbled pile of bodies. We laid the dead aside and covered their faces. It was a frantic fight to save the living.
Twice I leaned over a body and applied the kiss-of-life. Twice I failed. The disaster covered the front and several inside pages of the Sunday Express.
In the hectic couple of hours before the first edition they had struggled to nail down even the basic facts. My eyewitness account was split and paraphrased between several reports, the original saved for the daily newspaper that employed me. They were only 20 short. Of the 66 fatalities, there was one woman, Margaret Ferguson.
There were many youngsters. Thirty teenage boys included two brothers and five boys from the same Fife village of Markinch. The youngest lad, Nigel Pickup, was nine years old. More than a quarter of the funerals took place on the same day in Glasgow. The Rangers players were told to go to as many as they could.
Manager Willie Waddell ensured that everyone behaved with decorum and dignity. Jock Stein of Celtic was a tower of strength, along with many of his Parkhead people. They included year-old Kenny Dalglish, soon to join the Celtic first team, but willing to honour the Rangers dead in a foretaste of the unstinting and unprecedented service he would do as manager of Liverpool when 96 died in the Hillsborough stadium disaster in Sheffield in As grief swept the country, relatives asked why lessons had not been learned.
Those fans whose families had not been affected were loath to criticise Rangers in any way, to the point where the few who did so were regarded as traitors. But it did come out that, when more fans had been injured in crushes in and on the same stairway, Rangers had employed a civil engineer to prepare a report.
A fatal accident inquiry held at Pollokshaws Burgh Hall in Glasgow in February six weeks after the tragedy lasted seven days.
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