No excuse for Uefa echoing Hillsborough by instantly blaming Liverpool fans

Two days on from the Paris horrors, where Uefa demonstrated shocking ignorance of lessons learned from Hillsborough and other football catastrophes, Liverpool were already facing another one: beware the “independent inquiry”.

The Portuguese MP Tiago Brandão Rodrigues may well be made of the sternest independent mind, but Uefa has appointed him to conduct the review into the Champions League fiasco and Uefa itself is very much a focus for the necessary investigation.

The pile-up of catastrophes by police and organisers in the dystopian, teargassed approach to France’s national stadium has mostly been identified rapidly, by supporters with video evidence, the umbrella group Football Supporters Europe and some excellent reporting by sports journalists at the match. As so often, the causes of chaos can be terrifyingly simple: the police had no workable system to check for valid tickets some way from the turnstiles and instead held thousands of people in a ridiculous bottleneck for an age, before giving up completely. There were then breakdowns and closures at the turnstiles leading to more huge static queues, clearly aggravated by some groups of local lads chancing it to get in.

The excessively tooled-up police were filmed teargassing innocent people, young and old, at times with an air of bored dismissiveness, so even the French ministers are not denying that. The only real point of contention left, although highly toxic, is how much of the turnstile clogging was caused by fake tickets. The ministers’ claims, that there were 70%, or 30-40,000, Liverpool fans with fake or no tickets, look ludicrous – where, physically, were all these tens of thousands of people? – but there will have been some, a routine issue to be dealt