First the pain, then the anger, then the questions ╤ and as English football again counts its dead, this time after the worst tragedy in a British stadium, the biggest question of all is stark in its simplicity.
How was it possible, after all the previous disasters, inquiries, working parties, reports, recommendations and Acts of Parliament, for almost a hundred people to be crushed to death in a football ground which had a good safety record and was not full to capacity, while only a few yards away other spectators were moving around with room to spare?
Hillsborough was no Heysel because there was no riot, it was not a Bradford because there was no fire, it was not an Ibrox because there was no crush of fans going in opposite directions and it was not a Bolton because the ground as a whole was not overwhelmed by weight of numbers.
Yet certain aspects of each tragedy are highly relevant to what happened at the start of Saturday╒s doomed FA Cup semi-final.
In Brussels four years ago an already terrible situation was exacerbated by the lack of liaison between groups of police inside and outside the stadium. For a few tragic minutes there appears to have been a similar breakdown of communications at Hillsborough.
Much is being made of the decision, taken by a police officer shortly before Saturday╒s kick-off, to open a gate at the Leppings Lane end of the ground in order to ease the crush of Liverpool fans, some with tickets, some without, trying to get in. Had he known of the crush already built up in the passageway leading from turnstile B to the small rectangle of terracing immediately behind the Liverpool goal the gates would surely have remained shut.
Yet high above the Leppings Lane end a closed-circuit television camera must have given the police control room inside the ground a full picture of crowd movements on the forecourt, and the naked eye could see what was developing on the terraces. Why did the police fail to act on the evidence of their eyes and at least get the kick-off delayed?
Any policeman with regular experience of controlling football crowds will tell you that when a big match is played and people are coming through the turnstiles at the last minute the most critical point occurs as the game kicks off and those outside, hearing the roar inside, will redouble their efforts to gain entrance. It was this that produced the fatal surge at Hillsborough. If the game had been put back half an hour nobody need have died.
One of the lessons of Bradford was that in times of emergency the pitch represents the spectators╒ best means of escape. At Hillsborough people were fenced in on three sides with only tiny gates giving them access to the pitch. It had always been feared that pens designed to segregate fans and prevent pitch invasions might one day become death traps. On Saturday anti-hooliganism measures cost lives.
The Ibrox disaster of 1971 led directly to the 1975 Safety of Sports Grounds Act which laid particular emphasis on spectators having safe access to and egress from stadiums as well as giving strict guidelines on how many people could safely be accommodated in a given area.
Hillsborough╒s flow of admissions is controlled by computers which told Mr Graham Mackrell, the Sheffield Wednesday secretary, that even as the disaster happened the crowd occupying the terraces at the Leppings Gate was still below capacity. So why were so many people crammed into one small space when there was room elsewhere?
Afterwards an inspection of that end of the ground in the company of Mr Richard Faulkner, deputy chairman of the Football Trust, suggested that had the police been able to avoid the crush outside the perimeter gate the late arrivals could easily have been accommodated on the terracing on either side of the disaster area.
Mr John Williams, a Football Trust research lecturer at the Leicester University Department of Sociology who has co-authored several books on the behaviour of soccer fans, could not understand why there had been so few police controlling the inflow at the Liverpool end. ╥Why weren╒t barriers set up at the end of the street so that the police could make a check on who had tickets?╙ Mr Williams asked. ╥There was a crush at the turnstiles at 2.30 and I could see ticketless fans sitting on the walls looking for a way in. It was already becoming a problem then.╙
Mr Williams had a stand seat which gave him a full view of the disaster. ╥We could see people being crushed against the barriers at the front of the terracing but others were still pressing in at the back. Then both police and spectators started to rip out the fencing in order to get supporters out of that section.╙
Logic suggests that Liverpool should not have been allocated that end of Hillsborough at all but should have been allowed to fill the huge expanse of terracing at the Penistone Road end. Yet for the second year running Nottingham Forest, with an average home attendance of just over 21,000, were allocated 28,000 tickets and spread themselves across the Spion Kop, while Liverpool, whose average gate is nearer 40,000, were given 24,000 and a comparatively cramped enclosure.
Officially the Football Association decides the ticket allocation for semi-finals but it takes advice from the home club, Sheffield Wednesday in this case, who in turn act on the requirements of the police. At Hillsborough the prime concern of South Yorkshire Police appears to have been traffic flows. When it came to controlling a flow of people, they were found wanting.
Nottingham Forest were allotted the Penistone Road end and Liverpool the Leppings Lane end on geographical grounds. The fact that this meant Anfield receiving 4,000 fewer tickets was merely incidental. Yet Mr Rogan Taylor, Liverpudlian head of the Football Supporters╒ Association, argued that the organisers should have taken differing strengths of support into account.
╥Anyone who knows Liverpool fans should have realised that in this situation thousands would turn up without tickets. If you don╒t take support into account you are lighting the blue touch paper.╙
Apart from the odd idiot, usually young and at least alive, the abiding memory of Saturday╒s experience will be the immense dignity with which all involved conducted themselves. Not least were the Liverpool fans who used advertising boards as makeshift stretchers and ferried the injured and the dying to the ambulances with the speed and efficiency of highly trained paramedics.
Amid the chaos there were bound to be absurdities, asking spectators to clear the pitch, for example, when it was obvious that there was nowhere for them to go. The lack of information over the public-address system was deplorable. It was 50 minutes before Kenny Dalglish╒s voice was heard: ╥Obviously everone knows that there have been one or two problems. Please co-operate...╙
It took a long time for the extent of the tragedy to reach the rest of the crowd. There was a roar of anger when a Liverpool supporter was spotted apparently demolishing the goal at the Leppings Lane end. In fact he had been hoisted on a policeman╒s shoulders to remove the net which was impeding the rescue operation.
Just after five o╒clock, when in normal circumstances the winners would have been celebrating their success in reaching Wembley or the game would have been well into extra-time, a young couple wandered dazed across the deserted pitch ╤ the woman in tears, the man comforting her in a numbed sort of way. The poignancy of that moment only hardened the opinion that the worst tragedy in British sport had been the most avoidable.
Nobody should have to die in order to see Peter Beardsley hit the bar. English football grounds are many times safer than they were in the rickety days immediately after the Second World War but the capacity for human error and faulty judgments in a crisis is undiminished. Hillsborough has proved that.
