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Angus Macleod in yesterday's Times: "Drunken tangle on Stairway 13."


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Two tragedies linked by the cruellest twists of fate.

 

"It had, according to the radio commentary on the BBC Scottish Home Service, been a tame Old Firm encounter but with a highly-dramatic finale. Two goals - one for each team - in the last minute of the game.

 

The doyen of Scottish football commentators, David Francey, was at his loquacious best, injecting colour into an all-too-drab winter's afternoon in Glasgow. Before he signed off, he made mention of "something bad" appearing to have happened on the terracing at the Rangers end.

 

In those days, "something bad" at an Old Firm match meant flying bottles and cans and police rushing in where ordinary mortals would fear to tread, to seize the perpetrators. But not this time. It wasn't that kind of "something bad", he thought.

 

An hour later, news bulletins were talking of injuries, of scores of ambulancemen and women at the scene, of people being led away or carried out on stretchers - "something bad" had become "a major incident". With every television and radio bulletin that night on January 2, 1971, the toll mounted. Ten dead... 20... 30... I was home from university for New Year on the Isle of Lewis and in those days you couldn't get a Sunday paper there until Monday. And when we finally got them (around noon!), there was only one story. The Scottish Daily Express and Daily Record had pictures of the walking wounded, of club scarves peeking out from under the blankets that covered the dead. The back pages hardly bothered with the game.

 

The peerless John Rafferty in The Scotsman wrote as only he could of fleeting triumph and sombre disaster following fast on one another. The papers asked how this could have happened and answered their own question with stories of one fan having tripped and fallen, bringing others down. Other papers told stories of fans who had decided to go at the last minute - and died.

 

The drunken tangle on Stairway 13 became an enduring image of a day that made a mockery of the import too many of us place on football.

 

Lewis had known tragedy at New Year. On January 1, 1919, more than 200 servicemen coming home from the Great War perished when the Admiralty yacht Iolaire struck rocks a mile out from Stornoway Harbour.

 

Suddenly that New Year's weekend on Lewis, Ibrox and Iolaire seemed linked by the cruellest twists of fate."

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The Vanguard Bears have already taken this up with the author , who has admitted it is an almighty cock up and a full apology will be in the paper tomorrow . Yet again VB at their best

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Reading the article I think it was actually Macleod who had too many drams while writing it. The New Year tragedy at Stornoway in 1919 has absolutely nothing to do with the Ibrox disaster. If you had to go through the history books there have been hundreds of tragedies or disasters all around the world in the early days of the new year, but none of them are linked to what happened on Stairway 13.

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Almighty cock up doesn't come close to describing the damage done. In fact, I can't view this as a cock up at all. More like deliberate desecration. No apology will undo this.

 

Agreed. It was a deliberate attempt to play down the tragedy by referring to an unrelated one almost 50 years earlier where 3 times as many people died. He'd have been as well talking about a 747 crashing in India on 1st Jan 1978 being linked 'by the cruellest twists of fate'. It would have made as much sense - IE, none.

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Almighty cock up doesn't come close to describing the damage done. In fact, I can't view this as a cock up at all. More like deliberate desecration. No apology will undo this.

 

Well you know the VB guys , they aint letting this go

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