Joe Aribo high flying side Rangers have recorded a lot of astute performance this season as they head to Saturday’s clash with 16 points gap on the Scottish Premiership table but there is the Ibrox’s 50 years of agony which claimed the lives of 66 fans in a stairway leaving Rangers stadium after a foggy Old Firm in 1971 and ahead of their next meeting with Celtic this weekend, the pain still burns for those left behind.
The symmetries with Hillsborough will bring pain to all those whose lives have been inextricably bound up with that tragedy, too. The desperately inadequate football stadium.
The ambulances and bodies on stretchers around the pitch. The makeshift morgue in a local gymnasium. And the desolate parents left with what ifs. ‘What if I had never let my child go to that game?’
Billy Rae knows as much as anyone about that kind of agony. He lost a brother at Ibrox that day, 50 years ago on Saturday, and if he’d had things his way would have been there himself, cheering his heroes on before filing out onto the dilapidated concrete staircase where 66 people died.
Rangers were in his blood. He was a 10-year-old, whose father regularly took him down to Ibrox on the supporters’ bus from the Waterside mining village in Kirkintilloch. His big brother James had promised to take him to the Old Firm New Year’s derby — a fixture which will be played again on Saturday — and he had little reason to doubt the offer.
There was a nine-year age gap between the two of them but they got on. ‘I got some boxing gloves one Christmas and he showed me how to use them,’ Billy recalls. ‘I got a cut to the eye, but it was him showing me the way.’
It was at 12.30 pm on that matchday lunchtime — Saturday, January 2, 1971 — that a knock on the door came and Billy discovered he would not be going to the game after all.
The disaster certainly prompted action from Rangers. The club’s manager, Willie Waddell, made it his life’s work to re-engineer Ibrox into a stadium able to provide a safe, humane place for supporters. A memorial will be held before Saturday’s game. The 66 are not forgotten.
The family received £2,000 from Rangers, in what they took to be a compensation payment.
For the players of ’71, the memories remain equally vivid. John Greig, Rangers captain that day, will never forget returning late to the dressing room, following physio treatment on his knee, to find most of his team-mates had gone. ‘People had started to bring in bodies and were putting them on the massage tables.’
Greig felt the disaster alerted the world of football to the need for safety. ‘For supporters in the UK, this stadium was used as a template to make sure that any rebuilding of stadiums had to be to a certain level.’
Events at Hillsborough, 18 years later, demonstrated that it would take more than Glasgow’s devastation to shake football from its criminal complacency. There would be more ambulances, stretchers, and makeshift morgues.
Boasting of two Nigerian players in Joe Aribo and Leon Balogun, Steven Gerrard’s side claimed the first leg victory and will look to extend their fine run to extend their lead on the table when both teams clash again after both sides recorded victories in their last match.