An Everton supporters’ group are going to lodge a complaint against WYP over the way the force handled the trouble after the League Cup tie on Tuesday, which ended with seven fans being arrested.
According to the ‘Blue Kipper’ website, a crush developed around the bottom of the stairs that lead up into the away fans car and coach park behind the West Stand, which proved to be a bottleneck as only a few fans could get up the stairs at a time. When the police started to shout at the fans and ask them to move, a group at the front turned around and started to confront them.
Today there is a very shaky video on YouTube of the scousers chanting “Yorkshire Police, meerderers!” and “Justice for the 96”, even though they were from a different force from the one involved at Hillsborough. Eventually the police ran out of patience and the Everton fans say that batons and truncheons were used against them.
The Police are blaming a minority of fans for provocation, saying that “what trouble occurred was isolated and attributable to the actions of a small minority of visiting supporters numbering no more than 50”. The force is now looking at CCTV footage to see if they can apply for football banning orders any other fans other than those arrested.
But James Lyon, of Rice Lane Supporters' Club, said the group as a whole had lodged a complaint against the Police and many of its members had raised individual grievances. One Everton fan said "It was a bottleneck and there was not enough room for everyone to go up, so people started turning back. It was just really poor management on the part of the police."
Nobody comes out of this incident with any credit. Not the Everton fans, who were chanting at coppers who had nothing to do with the Hillsborough disaster, nor the Police who lost their rag and started laying into them. They should be able to take a bit of a ribbing, and it doesn’t sound as if the Everton fans were actually causing any danger or being violent towards the police.
And it’s probably time to examine how safe it is to herd the away fans up a couple of staircases towards the away cars and coaches. It might be OK for most league games when we only get a handful of away fans (with many being put off by the outrageous prices we usually charge away fans) but it’s clearly going to cause a problem when there are a large number of away fans as there were on Tuesday night.