Twenty-five years on, the Hillsborough stadium disaster still reverberates
In 1989, 96 fans were crushed to death in an English football tragedy, evoking waves of grief and fury that have not subsided
It would be remembered as the blackest day in British sport, but Saturday, April 15, 1989 began as a perfect day for a game of football.
Bright blue skies greeted fans of Liverpool and Nottingham Forest who had travelled to the industrial city of Sheffield in northern England for an FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough, home of Sheffield Wednesday.
Mingled with the anticipation was a sense of deja vu. The sides had met at the same ground at the same stage of the previous season's competition, Liverpool winning 2-1.
Within feet of me people were standing dead, bolt upright.
Despite bringing far more supporters to the game, Liverpool had been given the small Leppings Lane stand to the west of the stadium, with the larger Spion Kop behind the opposite goal taken over by Forest supporters who had journeyed to the ground from the south.
The terraces behind the goal at the Leppings Lane end were split into pens, and by half-past two pens three and four directly behind the goal were already heaving with supporters.
"Looking around, I could see that fans older and clearly more seasoned than me were getting edgy," Liverpool fan and survivor Adrian Tempany told The Observer newspaper.
Roadworks had held up some Liverpool fans en route to the game, and with kick-off fast approaching, thousands of supporters found themselves stuck outside the turnstiles, pressing to get in.
This created a bottleneck effect and when it became clear that fans were in danger of being hurt, Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield made the fateful call to open gate C in the security wall and release the pressure on those blocked outside.