Watching the Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show from 1980 on DVD, I was reminded that Eric Morecambe's beloved Luton Town are now a non-league club, after failing to beat Chesterfield at Kenilworth Road.
Their departure from the Football League comes two days before the 20th anniversary of arguably football's greatest recent tragedy. The death of 96 Liverpool fans at the FA Cup semi-Final at Sheffield Wednesday's home ground was initially declared by the more sensationalist media as an act of hooliganism (4 years after the Heysel Stadium disaster which also involved Liverpool fans), but was later declared by the Taylor Enquiry to be a failure of the police to control the situation.
The whole deep and sorry tragedy of Hillsborough brings to my mind the sheer folly and rashness of human behaviour at times; too often the police always take the blame for being unable to control a mob, and Liverpudlians likewise were equally dismayed (and still are) by the suggestion that they alone were the cause of their own fans' deaths. I suspect both aspects were partially true that day.
A watershed in Association Football history, it led thankfully to the elimination of "anti-hooligan" perimeter fencing (the true killer at Hillsborough) and terracing (including the legendary "Kop" terrace at Anfield) and one of the more positive aspects of the aftermath of Hillsborough was the decision to stage the FA Cup Final at Wembley (which Liverpool won in emotional circumstances) against close neighbours Everton with both sets of fans mixing freely together in the stands, and none of the segregation that usually creates tribal antipathy and sometimes extreme violence.
It's a trend which sadly hasn't caught on since (and it should), but what has is the whole commercial boom that football has become with the advent of sophisticated all-seater stadia - that Hillsborough indirectly helped to bring about. The game went up-market, and has now become one of this country's biggest economies.
And poor Luton Town have had to suffer by it, with their 30-point penalty at the beginning of the season (for "financial irregularities") - too great an obstacle for them to overcome. One can't help feeling that a top flight Premiership club would never dare receive such a harsh punishment. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Luton did at least avert financial disaster last season (despite the worst that the FA could do to them), thanks to a lucrative FA Cup Fourth Round replay against Premiership opponents: Liverpool.
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