Alex's Sports Column

And so David Duckenfield may now rest easily. The match day commander and chief super-intendant has been cleared of gross negligence manslaughter charges relating to his role in the Hillsborough disaster thirty years ago. He was found not guilty, the court heard. His ordeal is over. These families do not deserve such disappointment. They have the memories but not the embrace, they have the unrelenting sense of missed opportunity, all those heartfelt moments life can bring. For them, this verdict felt like a dose of necessary medicine where another outcome from the justice system might have concealed the symptoms.

This verdict is a disgrace beyond belief. One sun-strewn spring day in 1989, fans of Liverpool and Nottingham Forest headed off to do what they loved: watching their team. It would have never crossed their minds that the establishment, with the duty to keep them safe, would let them down. Duckenfield failed in his duty to the people he was in charge of protecting. He should have been held accountable and prosecuted.

Hillsborough was a disaster waiting to happen. It occurred due to a culmination of details starting hours before kick-off. The police failed in its duty to prepare for the motorway congestion, the thousands of ticketless fans. Crush barriers were corroded and fractured. Duckenfield ordered the opening of Gate C, sending a huge amount of people through tunnels not designed for such numbers, into pens three and four directly behind the goal. The opening of the gates was a fatal and deadly error. The idea that he won’t be held responsible for this is unfathomable.

Then we had the lies, the smears, the cover-up. Duckenfield tried to impose a false narrative, claiming that the Liverpool fans forced entry. This was the Eighties in the midst of the miner strikes, the riots, the scandals. The era of police corruption, when football hooliganism was a stain on the sport. This provided a catalyst for the most contemptuous of stances.

These deceitful lies were the real story of Hillsborough. Whilst the deceased lay on the pitch, fellow fans hoarding advertising boards as stretchers, performing CPR to their loved-ones in the absence of paramedics, Duckenfield and co were standing and watching, blunt when they needed to be sharp, throwing the blame elsewhere to avoid any responsibility.

The screams of those trapped were ignored. Some fans were so desperate to escape they sought to climbing the fences, police assuming they were attempting a pitch invasion. The front gates were not opened. The moribund were pushed back into the crush.

Duckenfield then apologised for shifting the blame in the aftermath, claiming he had “no idea” what motivated him to blame fans for his drastic mistakes. He admitted everything at the 2015 inquest, stating his “professional failings led to the death of 96 men and women.” The families, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives were close to closure back then when he was deemed responsible for the unlawful killing of the 96. Despite this, the retired officer was able to walk away on the back of concrete evidence and admission of his own wrongdoings.

This tragedy is symbolic of much more than football. It is the epitome of people failing to do their job. Anytime you or your loved-ones attend an event in the public domain you attend with the assurance and knowledge that the people in place to keep you safe do so. South Yorkshire Police did not. If there are wrongdoings or failures, then investigations must explain why to stop such catastrophes repeating. As a result, there must be accountability. No one will be left accountable for this horrific disaster. Duckenfield’s acquittal implies that no one was responsible for the death of 96 Liverpool supporters.

So now we know that no one will be held accountable. No one has been left to carry the weight of this disaster. They have had to wait thirty years to find out justice has let them down, and their ongoing agony can only be guessed at. No one should have to deal with such an emotional ordeal over such a prolonged period.

To lose a loved-one is an endless sorrow that no amount of sympathy can ever heal. Their hearts will forever ache at not only the pain of their loss but also at the justice system’s decision to throw it back in their faces.

Marco Silva became the fourth Premier League manager to lose his job within 16 days on Thursday.

On a bitter, cold, oddly gruelling Winter’s night, Marco Silva’s bitter, cold, oddly gruelling Everton tenure came to an end.

For the neutral this was a brilliant sporting spectacle, the battle of Merseyside, blocks of red and blue chugging up and down the pitch under those brilliant white lights. For Everton fans this was simply the final straw, and so it turned out to be.

The only thing shocking about his sacking on Thursday evening was that it came so deep into the season. It was oddly inevitable after a run of two wins in 10 that it would end at the hands of Liverpool, with Silva now being the fifth manager to lose his job after to defeat to Klopp’s Liverpool.

Silva often has a harrowing look etched across his face but there was something disturbing about his Anfield demeanour, a man surely aware of the repercussions of another bruising defeat: dear old Marco, fronting up in his chalk rectangle, small and plump in his knee-length rain mac, arms flapping at the sides like broken deckchair struts.

What took so long, Mr Kenwright? This sacking has been pencilled tentatively on the footballing calendar for weeks after no obvious signs of progression, no clear strategy, no signs of the deeper knots and snags starting to click. The time it took for this decision to come to fruition is almost as entirely strange as the decision to bring these two together in the first place.

On the outside this is a young, ambitious, encouraging coach whos marriage with the Premier League was destined for the top. Yet in reality, Silva has now had three years in the top division with three clubs, all of whom are either in the relegation zone or have been relegated.

On the surface it reads rather bleakly as 41 wins in 109 games. For some bizarre reason this is a manager who has been aggressively recruited for each of his clubs, with Farhad Moshiri, controversially, making him his personal pet project when pursuing him at Watford in October 2017.

Over two years later and no real follower of the Silva years can say with any certainty his pattern of play, his style of management, tactics, managerial attributes. At the age of 42 he must still have some hope he can succeed, but will another club take the risk? I doubt it.

It is easy for the decision makers to focus solely on the image, the fruitful idea of a young, foreign coach, investing in this well-tended disparate machine with all those high-spec parts on the outside but glued together without any real chemistry, pieces in the wrong places, no sense of pattern.

Some will pour fretfully over the weaknesses of this Everton team, a porous defence, weak in the transitions, but this is the modern game where owners see footballing success through the prism of whoever is standing in that carefully marked out chalk rectangle.

Despite a summer spending spree of £107.91m there are much deeper problems, starting at the top; the people recruiting these players, seemingly picking and choosing at young foreign talent, cherry picking at the European heavyweights dead-wood.

This is an oddly brittle group of players, able to perform against Leicester last weekend, and then be torn apart by their archest rivals with no real fight, passion, desire. That inconsistency stems from the coaching zone, the belief in his plans.

This is a football club now under real pressure to get its next appointment right, to find someone tactically astute to bind these talented players together, before this club enters a parabola of decline which has haunted too many other footballing giants.

David Duckenfield’s acquittal proves that the justice system has failed once again

Another manager bites the dust, but Marco Silva’s time in England has surely reached the endgame