The Show Does Not Need to Go On

European football's governing body promises a decision within 24 hours on the latest crucial question in the tragic, messy saga of Leeds United and Galatasary: will the second leg go ahead but without Turkish fans? Two people are dead, two families lives devastated, but only a week later, football has already moved on, concentrating on the politics and bickering surrounding the circumstances of getting next weeks game on again.

Leeds, backed by the Football Association, are pushing for Turkish fans to be banned on security grounds; Galatasary argue they should not be punished for the criminal actions of people tenuously linked to the club, and say that if the game is to go ahead, security should be provided for supporters as well as for players and officials. UEFA, as last week when the two clubs were forced to argue over whether and how to play the first leg, have looked to float serenely above the fray, concentrating solely on demanding security guarantees, avoiding any stance remotely resembling leadership, moral or otherwise.

Peter Ridsdale, the Leeds chairman, has handled the affair with remarkable sensitivity since being given news of the stabbings last Wednesday evening while at dinner with Galatasary directors discussing footballs capacity to bring people together. Throughout footballs long, terrible history of supporter fatalities, no chairman has become involved so immediately or sympathetically with the victims and their families. Yet after his long night, of identifying bodies, in one case with the victims brother, Ridsdale was forced to sit with Galatasarys president and Uefas delegate on Thursday morning, to make a decision about whether to play the football match.

Despite Uefas long experience of organising matches which have periodically resulted in disaster, it has no established procedures to cope. In haste, and in circumstances hardly conducive to taking a rational decision, it is clear that cancelling the tournament was barely given serious thought. The other options were interrogated, their and then, for their implications. If the game was postponed, where and when would it be replayed? It was this which produced the decision to play the game, again with no united policy as to a minutes silence or black armbands, described by Ridsdale as the \"least worst option\". This decision was backed "to the hilt" by the FA, according to executive director David Davies, who says the FA offered Ridsdale support, but not advice.

Another moral and practical option does not appear to have been considered: postponing the game, without immediately rearranging it. The clubs would have separated, the Leeds supporters gone home. The victims and their families needs could then have been fully considered, and the authorities forced to reflect, in depth, on how the killings were caused and what should be done to prevent such things happening again. As a priority, the destination of the Uefa Cup ought to have fallen in after that.

But in the leadership vacuum, as resounding historically here as at Uefa, football has always fallen on simple sentiment. First, that the show must go on, and then, the tendentious justification that playing the game would pay tribute to those who have died.

This has been footballs response every time to its many disasters, dating back to Ibrox on April 5 1902 the same day, erriely, as last Wednesdays stabbings. Then, 26 people died when wooden terraces collapsed six minutes into an England v Scotland game, but the match, after a short delay, was completed.

At Burnden Park in 1946, the crush which killed 33 supporters happened soon after kick off in the FA Cup quarter final between Bolton and Stoke. Again, apparently on police advice, the game was played out. Stanley Matthews, who was playing for Stoke that day, has written graphically about the experience in his recently published autobiography The Way It Was (Headline 18.99). As the players filed out of the tunnel to resume play, he relates that an angry supporter snarled: "Tis' a crime to carry on."

"It was," says Matthews.

Waiting to receive a throw-in in the second half, Matthews saw body bags lying round the pitch, a sight whose horror, he said, never left him. Yet he argues the authorities were quick to forget:

"It was seen as a tragic one-off by those who ran our game."

In this, Matthews agrees with Lord Justice Taylor, whose report into the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster began with the "depressing and chastening fact" that football had not learned the lessons of its disasters and the subsequent official inquiries. Leadership, said Taylor, had been lamentable, and this failure prompted him to recommend legislation, forcing clubs to introduce all-seater stadia and safety regimes, because they could not be trusted to do so themselves.

"The lessons of past disasters and the recommendations following them," says the Taylor Report, "have not been taken sufficiently to heart."

It is surely arguable, that the perennial insistence that games be played and tournaments completed following disasters, has contributed to this failure to fully reflect and learn lessons. After Hillsborough, the FA took only three days to decide that the semi-final should be re-scheduled and the FA Cup concluded. The same language was used then, that the game would be a kind of tribute to those who died, a position which looks extremely difficult to justify with the benefit of eleven years of hindsight.

Last weekend, Peter Ridsdale, maintaining his sense of perspective, talked of "Getting the second leg out of the way so we can get on with mourning these two people". But this is proving difficult; emotions are being chanelled into the arguments about the game itself, exacerbating, not healing, tensions between the two clubs and their supporters. This is delaying the process of coming to terms with what happened, and forcing Leeds and the FA into a stance which says, by implication, that we cannot guarantee the safety of innocent Turkish visitors from possible attack by some angry people in Leeds.

Meanwhile, the complex, difficult issues are not being addressed: about the image and treatment of British football supporters abroad, and the ugly behaviour of some; the conduct of some Turkish fans and their clubs and authorities response to it. Crucially, there are questions over Uefas status as governing body of the tournaments it promotes; it has surprisingly minimal involvement in the practicalities of matches, other than in commercial matters which it controls absolutely from the centre. Host clubs are solely responsible not only for security, but even for sharing information about the oppositions country and culture, with little in the way of expert support from Uefa, which has been organising European matches for over 40 years.

Last Thursday, in the heat of a terrible situation, playing the game may have seemed the "least worst option". Historically, though, this has been a means of avoiding, not answering, footballs difficult questions, and has therefore provided no true, lasting tribute to those who have died. Now, inquiries are promised, but only after the tie has been completed. Football supporters must hope the inquiries will be thorough and the lessons truly learned, not shuffled off by authorities which spent their emotions keeping the show on the road, then moved on to the next big game, forgetting.