January 2: On This Day in World History … briefly
The 1971 Ibrox disaster was a crush among the crowd at an Old Firm football game, which led to 66 deaths and more than 200 injuries.
1971: Soccer fans crushed to death
The Ibrox disaster was a crush among the crowd at an Old Firm football game, which led to 66 deaths and more than 200 injuries on 2 January 1971 in an exit stairway at Ibrox Park (now Ibrox Stadium) in Glasgow, Scotland. It was the worst British football disaster until the Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield, England, in 1989. The stadium’s owner, Rangers FC, was later ruled to be at fault in a sheriff’s judgement on one of the deaths. Rangers did not dispute this ruling, and was sued for damages in 60 other cases brought by relatives of the dead.
The match was an Old Firm game (Rangers v Celtic) and was attended by more than 80 000 fans. In the 90th minute, Celtic took a 1–0 lead through Jimmy Johnstone and some Rangers supporters started to leave the stadium. However, in the final moments of the match, Colin Stein scored an equaliser for Rangers. As thousands of spectators were leaving the ground by stairway 13, it appears that someone may have fallen, causing a massive chain-reaction pile-up of people.
The loss included many children, five of them schoolmates from the town of Markinch in Fife. The youngest child to die was Nigel Patrick Pickup of Liverpool, aged 9. Most of the deaths were caused by compressive asphyxia, with bodies being stacked up to six feet deep in the area. More than 200 other fans were injured. Initially there was speculation that some fans left the ground slightly early when Celtic scored, but then turned back when they heard the crowd cheering when Stein scored the equaliser, colliding with fans leaving the ground when the match ended. The official inquiry into the disaster indicated that there was no truth in this hypothesis, however, as all the spectators were heading in the same direction at the time of the collapse.
Liverpool legend Kenny Dalglish, then a Celtic player, was in the stands when the tragedy occurred. Dalglish would also be present at the Heysel and Hillsborough disasters in 1985 and 1989, respectively.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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