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I'm Sruti, I'm Hannah and welcome to Redhanded. This week on Redhanded, we're going to be talking about the Hillsborough disaster.

The events that took place on the 15th of April,

1989, during the FA Cup semifinal between Liverpool Football Club and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough Stadium,

claimed the lives of 96 men, women and children and left 766 other people injured.

A coroner ruling confirmed that the 97th death occurred just last year in 2021, when Andrew Davine died from aspiration pneumonia as a direct result of brain injuries that he sustained on that tragic day 32 years ago.

Of the 96 who lost their lives in 1989, the youngest was just 10 years old and the oldest was 67,

and unbelievably only 14 of those who died ever made it to hospital.

All of those innocent people who died or survived the disaster were the victims of the complacency, ineptitude and sheer incompetence of those whose very jobs were to ensure their safety.

Multiple warnings and complaints had been raised before about safety issues at that same stadium, but they had all been ignored for years by officials,

and the absolutely disgusting way in which senior police officers and other authorities at the time attempted to clear their own names of any responsibility by placing the blame on the fans themselves just made this horrendous situation even worse.

But we'll come back to that later in this episode.

For now, let's start by taking you through the Nightmarish series of events that unfolded on the 15th of April 1989.

It was a warm spring day and one of the biggest sporting events of the year in England.

Liverpool and Nottingham Forest were set to go head to head in the FA Cup semi-finals, the FA Cup if you don't know what it is.

It's called the Giant Killer. It's where Premier League football teams and Lower League football teams have the opportunity to play each other,

and it's called the Giant Killer because sometimes the big teams lose.

And would you say like, I don't know very much about football, but I'm aware FA Cup, Big Deal, Liverpool Nottingham Forest, is that like a longstanding rivalry as that some sort of big game?

No, I mean, it's just because it's semi-finals maybe then.

Yeah, I mean, my guess would be, I mean, we're not particularly familiar with the standings of football clubs in 1989 because I wasn't alive, but my guess would be that Nottingham Forest is the underdog.

Yeah, that's what I would have thought.

And probably would not have had an opportunity to play Liverpool.

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