On May 11 1985, fifty-six people died in a devastating fire at Bradford City's old Valley Parade football ground. It was truly horrific, a startling story - and wholly avoidable - but nobody was ever held to account and its lessons were not learned. Four years later, the disaster at Hillsborough should never have happened.
Twelve-year-old Martin Fletcher was at Valley Parade that day, celebrating Bradford's promotion to the top flight, with his dad, brother, uncle and grandfather. Martin was the only one of them to survive the fire - the biggest loss suffered by a single family in any British football disaster.
Later, as an adult, Martin devoted himself to extensively investigating how the disaster was caused, exposing its context and culture of negligence and whitewash. This book tells the gripping, extraordinary, in-depth story, of a boy's unthinkable loss following a spring afternoon at a football match, of how fifty-six people could die at a football match, and of the truths he unearthed as an adult. This is the story - thirty years on - of the disaster football has never properly acknowledged.
