The city of Liverpool on Wednesday marked the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough stadium disaster which left 96 Liverpool fans dead and changed the face of English football. While players and officials of the Premier League club gathered with fans at the team's Anfield Stadium for a memorial service, public transport ceased and church bells rang at 3:06 P.M. (1406 GMT) – the time when the April 15, 1989, FA Cup semifinal between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest was halted because of a fatal crush in one of the stands. Police had opened a gate to alleviate crowding outside the ground, allowing fans to surge into an area already packed with standing fans. The influx crushed 94 fans to death inside the Sheffield stadium, while two more died later. “It taught me the value of life,” said Kenny Dalglish, Liverpool manager at the time. “Football is very, very important but for two or three weeks after Hillsborough it became unimportant. The most important part of that time were the peoples lives.” After an inquiry by a senior judge exposed flaws in the way football games were policed in stadiums, the government ruled that all topflight stadiums would be all seater and that perimeter fences would be torn down. Bruce Grobbelaar, Liverpool's goalkeeper on the day, tried to alert the authorities to the tragedy unfolding behind him, asking them to open the fence gates. “I noticed when the game started and the balls went over, people were asking me to try and help them because their faces were right up against the fence,” he told the BBC. “The force on the people's faces right against the wire mesh, you could see the indentation on the face, against their skin.”
