Scottish football's darkest day

Ibrox was the scene of the devastating tragedy

BBC Scotland sports correspondent Chick Young reflects on Scottish football's darkest day when 66 people were killed leaving a football match at Ibrox Stadium.

It was the darkest of dark days. Glasgow wept a public grief and the world sent its sympathy.

My native city has had its unfair share of hellish tragedies. The fire at Cheapside Street and the Clarkston Toll gas explosion happened in my lifetime...but what happened at Ibrox somehow haunts me more, because I was there.

I was 19 years of age, fresh out of school and working on the lowest rung of of the journalistic ladder at the Daily Record.

But professionally I knew where I wanted to go and that involved being at the major football matches. Old Firm games always came into that category.

Rangers against Celtic on the south side of the city or its east end have always been occasions to take my breath away. The fixture would probably do so even in a clearing in the Amazon jungle.

It was the dawn of a new year. But first there was a terrible darkness.

I support neither and have never, even in my youth, carried a torch for either side. But I'm a Glaswegian. I understand the passion within.

The Old Firm atmosphere is special, albeit for all the wrong reasons. I despise the bigotry and the hatred, in fact I'm bewildered that people who live side by side can be pea-brained enough not to see the insanity of it all.

But when you get right down to it, watching the tribal confrontation is like plugging into an electric socket.

We make ridiculous claims about this city, but I do believe that the citizens are truly justified in the boast about the greatest derby match in the world.

2 January, 1971 was a match just like all the rest. The most important Old Firm game since...well, the last one actually. It was ever thus.

Celtic were midway through their game of monopoly with the championship, dovetailing titles with European Cup final appearances.

But Rangers, under the stewardship of Willie Waddell and the sorcerer's apprentice Jock Wallace, were building a side which would soon make its own mark in Europe.

The crowd at Ibrox was massive

It was the dawn of a new year. But first there was a terrible darkness.

My most compelling memory of the day is the weather. It was cold and it was foggy. The kind of day on which, in your nightmares, you imagine evil to be in the air.

Jimmy Johnstone scored for Celtic and legend has it that the Rangers fans started to exit in disgust.

When Colin Stein equalised the story goes that they u-turned on stairway 13 and in the head-on collision which ensued, 66 souls perished.

A public enquiry later questioned that theory...but it didn't really matter, because nothing was going to change for those who perished.

And what a hellish way to die. Crushed, gasping for breath with a fearsome pressure upon them.

The barriers were built to withstand a mighty weight but when it was all over they were left crumpled like plasticine.

I had left early and it was not until much later that news began to filter through of the magnitude of the tragedy.

The concern for crowd safety was next door to non-existent.

It's a little bit like when President Kennedy was assassinated. Everyone remembers what they were doing when they heard the news. I was at a party in the Cardonald area, not that far from Ibrox Stadium.

When I heard what had happened my first thoughts were for my step-brother who had been at the game but who had not returned home.

As it happens he was well, but our parents were frantic because he had not been accounted for. I guess that was a scenario which was recounted in thousands of other homes.

In truth when you began to think about it the fact that it had not happened before was in itself a miracle.

I've been in Hampden with 130,000-plus fellow spectators. The concern for crowd safety was next door to non-existent.

As a kid I exited grounds in crowds so tightly packed my feet never touched the ground until I was halfway across the street. It was incredible that we survived at all.

Out of the darkness of Ibrox came some light, Willie Waddell and his board of directors had the vision to see that Ibrox had to be torn down and that the only way ahead was the management of smaller, all seated crowd.

Maybe the death of 66 saved the lives of many more. But that will be no consolation to the families of those who perished.

Thirty years down the line there are mothers, fathers and children who cannot conceive that their relative went to a football match and never came back.

Theirs is a darkness which can never go away.