Cod Almighty | Diary

Player injury, added time... Last moment winner (5,7)

28 April 2016

One last time on Hillsborough. It is a victory – a tragic victory, because while it finally and firmly exonerates Liverpool fans of all the muck that was flung at them, it does not bring back the 96 people whose lives were lost.

Victory, they say, has many parents but defeat is an orphan. It is remarkable how many now feel they can share the mantle of the families of the 96, as though the calumnies they suffered were the work of a few rogue officers, rather than systematic lying shared by politicians, civil servants and the press. It is not political point-scoring to remind you that as recently as 2011 David Cameron said: "The families of the Hillsborough tragedy are a blind man in a dark room looking for a cat that isn't there."

Middle-Aged Diary has written it before, but it is worth taking another look at We are Town. First the cover photograph, the joyous faces of Town fans on a day out at Wimbledon framed by the sinister steel of fortified fencing. Our trip to Plough Lane was less than two months before Hillsborough. Then read again pages 101-104. Those extracts from the early editions of Sing When We're Fishing are at the emotional core of the book. The dominant narrative of the time was that football fans were public order offences waiting to happen. Much of the evocative writing collected in We are Town was produced in reaction to that perception. It is the same perception that gave rise to Hillsborough itself.

What you read in the press today about migrants, about Muslims, about benefit claimants, is the kind of filth that a quarter of a century ago was being aimed at trade unionists and football fans. We need to look for the untold stories

The power of the press to prevent social change is sometimes overstated. Miners in 1984 learnt from the lies the media told about their own lives that they should not believe everything they read. In 1989, the city of Liverpool learnt the same lesson. But we can only meaningfully say "never again" if we generalise. What you read today about migrants, about Muslims, about benefit claimants, is the kind of filth that a quarter of a century ago was being aimed at trade unionists and football fans. We need to look for the untold stories.

Perceptions of football managers rarely allow us to hold competing narratives in our heads. Paul Hurst's detractors will continue to treat his flaws as fatal and his strengths as negligible. His supporters will do the opposite. Balance comes later, if we are lucky.

There must have been a flutter in the hearts of some yesterday when Forest Green announced that, with the club guaranteed a second-place finish and promotion to the Football League still in the offing, they had nevertheless sacked manager Ady Pennock. As the Hurst supporters' last line of defence has been "this is hardly the time to change managers", there was no doubt a counter-cry of "If they can do it, why don't we?" I've heard "promotion-guaranteeing" managers are especially abundant this time of year.

If it's true that for the last couple of months Pennock has been doubling as the Forest Green groundsman, we must accept that there are deeper problems at the New Lawn than the occupant of the manager's office. As it is, so fitful is the form of all the play-off contenders that part of me suspects the Football League is just waiting to check Tranmere don't sneak through before announcing they are only prepared to let Cheltenham go up. That might sound paranoid. But I did live through the 1980s.