Search: ' Valley Parade'
Shop
Stories
Playing for England at youth level doesn’t always herald a glittering future. In June 2003 we looked at the stuttering careers of Kevin Gallen, Stephen Hughes and Darren Caskey
A verbatim play has been touring the country which tells survivors’ stories of the Valley Parade fire of 1985 in Bradford, and Tom Hocking went along
There is a line towards the end of The 56 when one of the characters says that the city of Bradford “wrapped its arms around itself” in the disaster’s aftermath. The line evokes the coming together of a community, but also suggests why it was regularly called football’s “forgotten” tragedy. The city’s strength to bury, mourn and remember their dead but to try to “get on” as best they could inadvertently masked its impact.
Jon Spurling remembers how the FA began trialling regular games on the Sabbath in the 1970s despite protests from religious groups
Football was facing a crisis at the start of 1974. Attendances in all four divisions had been in decline for a while and floodlit matches were banned as part of the “three day week” introduced by Prime Minister Edward Heath to save on electricity consumption. Sunday football was regarded as one way to inject some life back into the flagging domestic game.