Last week, in the fervor of the Newscorp issues, I made mention of the Hillsborough Disaster and the Sun’s response to it. A few folks dinged me on that for stating that the “Liverpool fans rushed the field.”

There was a great deal more to it than that. The police involved with security for the match had forced the Liverpool fans (despite being hugely more numerous) to the end of the field with fewer seats. Said fans were shunted down a side-entrance not meant to handle those kinds of numbers, such that when the police opened a side-entrance that was not intended to handle that many people, the crush began.

In the end there were 96 fatalities. An inquiry was held which resulted in blame being placed primarily on handling by the police and the insufficient design of the stadium. For what it’s worth, when I said they rushed the field, I wasn’t blaming the fans. It was just a quick way of explaining what happened in the disaster. The point of my post was to pinpoint the extremely distasteful, and false, report by the Sun that there had been looting, etc., by fans in the process. I didn’t want to get into the details of the incident itself.

As an American and a relatively-recent fan of Premier league footy (and a recent convert from an Arsenal fan to a Liverpool fan, and before I’d even heard of this incident), I feel a bit bad for having given the wrong impression there. But as they say:

Support a team, that plays in red, A team that we all know, A team that we call *Liverpool*, To glory we will go.