How the Kop’s chants propelled Andy Burnham to fight for Hillsborough justice

A speech at Anfield in 2009 was met with boos but it led to a change in tack by Labour government and an apology from David Cameron

Since dawn, visitors from as far afield as Australia had been laying flowers, scarves and messages underneath Anfield’s Eternal Flame. These Hillsborough memorial anniversary services were usually subdued and respectful affairs, with 10,000 mourners sitting on the Kop to give themselves and the families support on the most difficult of days.

But on the afternoon of 15 April 2009, the 20th anniversary of the disaster, it felt different. There was an edge in the air. An hour before the service began the Kop was full and the numbers in the three other stands were starting to swell. By the time I had walked with the families from the meeting place in the Centenary Stand to our seats at the front of the Kop, 29,000 people inside Anfield stood to give them the loudest and most heartfelt of ovations. After two decades in which a new generation had been born and reached adulthood, the wounds of Hillsborough were still gaping, the anger still raw at the lack of admission of guilt from above.

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