And the Sun Shines Now: How Hillsborough and the Premier League Changed Britain:
In the first substantial memoir from a survivor of Britain’s worst sporting disaster, Adrian Tempany answers the question so often asked over the past 27 years: "What is it you’re after? What do you want when you chant 'Justice for the 96?'" wrote Peter Marshall of the FINANCIAL TIMES. What "he wanted was the truth." The "denial of truth, writes Tempany in And the Sun Shines Now, dishonoured the memory of the 96 Liverpool fans who died at the 1989 FA Cup semi-final, packed into an already overcrowded terrace at Sheffield’s Hillsborough stadium and penned in by iron railings designed to combat pitch invasions." In the absence of their testimony, "swathes of the wider population swallowed the alternative 'truth': the lie that drunkenness and hooliganism were to blame." Rupert Murdoch’s Sun had “set the terms of the national debate” with "lurid falsehoods about bestial fans." With his "own terrifying experience so long denied -- and
 |
there’s an extended passage in which the author explains exactly what happens when life is being squeezed from you -- Tempany, now a journalist, tries to make sense of it all by examining the subsequent transformation in the game that so nearly killed him." Hence the subtitle: “How Hillsborough and the Premier League Changed Britain.” Tempany "sees Murdoch as a key figure." The media owner’s BSkyB, with U.K. broadcasting rights to the Premier League, "turned supporters into subscribers." The "argument that football has grown rich by taking the game from its traditional support is a familiar one." But "seldom has it been so passionately lodged." Alienated "by the monetisation of the Premier League, Tempany finds the spirit of English football has migrated to Germany, where ticket prices are low and you can stand in safety behind the goal." We are left "haunted by Hillsborough’s great lie." Those "who survived the crush were never the lumpen thugs of the Sun’s monstrous caricature." Tempany "writes movingly of how they wept together in a court annexe on hearing the new inquests’ jury conclusions: the fans were blameless, the police were culpable." Truth "at last" (
FT, 6/7).
