Page 27 - 368603 LP250721 AWY AWY AWY Book (238pp A5)

Elmwood Street and recreated the night’s impending game between the two of us. Sunderland won of course. It was a warmish evening in late winter and in the Burn Park area there was no hint of the mayhem that was building over at Roker Park.
We’ll never know how many people were in the ground for the match but in the Sunday Mirror’s Brian McNally’s account of the events, he estimates there were 120,000 in and around the ground and says his teenage feet didn’t touch the ground for ten minutes as he was carried along in the human tide. Most estimates were that around 75,000 actually got inside, many of whom hadn’t paid as the crowd pressure on a gate at the Roker End had caused a wall to collapse and thousands surged in. There were soon stories doing the rounds of little old ladies going out to get a packet of tea and being so engulfed by the tightly-packed crowd that they were swept into the ground through the gap in the wall. I think I recall seeing photos in the Echo of a street being awash with shoes that had come off in the crush. In the chaos two people died of heart-attacks and around eighty were injured and it’s really a surprise that there weren’t many more casualties. The official attendance was 46,727, one of whom was our Graham. The cinder track around the pitch had to accommodate thousands who couldn’t fit onto the terraces and when I watched the highlights on the news later I’m sure many of these ran onto the pitch after one of our goals.
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