A miserable midweek game at Barnsley on 25th March, 1980. It was 0-0 and me and two mates went. We were stood on the visitors end (left-hand goal as you look on TV) and it was basically a slag-heap with cinders on top and the occasional railway sleeper driven in to provide 'steps'. You wouldn't get away with it nowadays. Well, maybe Wendy would. So dire was the game that the 3 of us stood at the very back watching a continuous queue for the hot-dog stall. 'He must be making a fucking fortune!' we mused.
Anyway, the full-time whistle (mercifully) went and several thousand Blades (The crowd was >19k) poured out. Peering over the heads of the crowd, there seemed to be a bit of a commotion up ahead, and the crowd seemed a bit higher than the rest. When we got there, this fortune-making hot-dog stall was no more that a pile of broken timber - it had be totally trashed.
Not Blades-related but still appealing to my destructive nature, I went to the 1976 FA Cup Semi-Final at Hillsborough - Man. U. v Derby. Didn't have a ticket, but that was often an optional extra in those days. 20k ticketless Man. U. fans turned up and created havoc all afternoon. About an hour before KO, I was near the players' entrance at the back of the south stand (where the gobby pig fans had a go at our team last Sunday but wasn't mentioned in the Star...). Simliar to the Barnsley story, a section of the crowd were about 2 feet higher than the rest and seemed be slowly rising and falling. When the crowd subsided (aided by several police dogs) about twenty Man. U. fans had been using a black limousine as their 'platform' to get a better look. Every panel was bent to fuck and the occupant? Sir. Matt Busby.
With about 30 minutes of the game left, and fed up with the carnage outside the ground, the cops. opened the gates to an already-crammed kop and several thousand more crowded in. 1989 had been coming for a long time at Hillsborough.