It was actually Bruce Grobbelaar who started the rumours. He said that he was concerned before the game as to the amount of Chelsea shirts he saw around the ground.
He never told anyone until everyone was home like.
Grobbelaar’s penalty heroics helped Liverpool win the European Cup in Rome in 1984. A year later, they reached the final again, when they were due to play Juventus in Brussels. With 60,000 fans assembling inside the Heysel stadium, a riot started, resulting in the collapse of an already crumbling wall and the deaths of 39 Juventus supporters. A five-year blanket ban on English sides playing in Europe followed, but Grobbelaar is adamant that the instigators were not from Liverpool.
“It was worse than witnessing what I saw in the Bush. These were grown men behaving like savages. My then mother-in-law came over for the final on the ferry, and she was one of many who were handed pamphlets by the National Front, which basically said, 'Liverpool will not be in Europe again.'
"The NF saw Scousers as scroungers and envied Liverpool’s success on a football field. My mother-in-law said that a lot of the people handing out pamphlets had Chelsea and Millwall tattoos on their arms. People are still free now with blood on their hands.”
Grobbelaar later decided to try to find out for sure whether the NF were really implicated in Heysel. “I travelled to one of their headquarters just outside Slough for a group meeting. They recognised me straight away and because I was a white guy from Rhodesia, they assumed that I was racist. So they welcomed me.
"I had a drink and tried to relax. One of the heads approached me and we got talking. I asked whether they knew anybody who was involved in Heysel and all of a sudden he went cold, said no, then walked off. He sussed me and I decided it was best I leave for my own safety.”
