Supporters just lucky to escape stadium tragedy

If you think that the punch-up in the last minutes of the Galatasaray-Fenerbahçe football game last Sunday was the lowest that sports could hit in this country, you are wrong, because it could have been a lot worse. Actually, hundreds of fans were lucky that they did not die with a collapse of the stands at the Ali Sami Yen Stadium.

Toward the end of the Turkcell Super League derby, the pitch staged a string of events and a brawl between the two sides’ players, which resulted in the sending-off of four footballers. However, there was another incident on the other end of the pitch that escaped most of the television cameras. Fenerbahçe goalkeeper Volkan Demirel came in front of the covered stands holding his genitals, provoking anger in the fans.

Supporters in the second floor of the stands got on top of the roof of the first level, in reaction to the Turkish international. However, their reaction could have triggered a disaster, as the platform they stood on was so vulnerable that it could not carry dozens of people. Some fans on the first floor started to run away in panic when they heard that the roof was cracking. Thankfully, some of the fans warned the others to get off the platform, and they went back to their places before no one got hurt. However, the event proved how irresponsible a player could act, how careless fans could behave and how managers of a stadium could oversee a small detail that would prevent fans from getting on the roof of a stadium so easily.

Speaking to the daily Hürriyet, Cemal Gökçe, the chairman of the Chamber of Istanbul Civil Engineers, said there were a number of negligent issues. "If that platform was not built under the surveillance of engineers, there may be some problems, so it definitely needs technical research," said Gökçe. "In constructions like that, security comes first, not the look of it."

"Furthermore, in a place where there are thousands people, fans should be prevented from getting on that platform. People can get over meters of barriers at that kind of game, let alone a half-meter fence," he said.

’Like a trap’
A professor at Istanbul Technical University, Erdoğan Uzgider, said that it should have been foreseen that people could get on it, adding that "it was like a trap."

Professor Gülay Altay, the head of the Istanbul-based Kandilli Observatory, said the platform was made so simple and does not look strong enough to carry loads.

"It is purely coincidence if something didn’t happen," she said.

Demirel defended himself saying that he had a groin injury and had no intention of provoking the fans, but still, his actions could have had triggered a big disaster, such as the Hillsborough incident 20 years ago.

Ninety-six Liverpool supporters were killed 20 years ago today at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, as hundreds of fans were crammed into sections that were already full.

The horrifying scenes at Hillsborough Stadium in the northern city of Sheffield on April 15, 1989, when spectators were crushed and suffocated in overcrowded sections during the 1989 FA Cup semifinals between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, prompted a sweeping modernization of stadiums around the country and also transformed inadequate policing.

A 90-day inquiry by a senior judge exposed flaws in the way football games were policed in stadiums, which were unsafe, and the government of the time ruled that all top-flight stadiums would be all-seaters and that perimeter fences would be torn down.

Hundreds of fans already in Hillsborough’s Pen 3 Ğ official capacity 2,000 Ğ were crushed against the metal fences or concrete floors and walls. Furthermore, with officers suspecting a pitch invasion, fans trying to escape by climbing the spike-topped fences were pushed back into the stands. As 2,000 more fans surged through into the central pens in the Leppings Lane end, police failed to ease congestion by cutting off access or opening exit gates Ğ "a blunder of the first magnitude," Lord Justice Peter Taylor concluded in his inquiry.

One can only hope that Turkey can take the lessons from Sunday’s game and calls for change before some incident as tragic as the Hillsborough disaster happens.