Luton-Millwall riot 40 years on: ‘I was scared. The tunnel was like a field hospital'

Telegraph

13-03-2025

Looking back 40 years to the evening of March 13, 1985, David Pleat is unequivocal. 'It was the worst night of my career in football,' he says. 'A terrible, terrible evening.'
At the final whistle of the FA Cup sixth-round tie that night between Luton Town – the team Pleat managed – and Millwall at Kenilworth Road, hundreds of visiting supporters stormed the pitch. They had spent much of the match tearing out the seating in the Bobbers Stand and now, using the debris as makeshift ammunition, charged across the playing surface, scattering the lines of police who were trying to restore order.
Pleat, along with the match officials and both sets of players, had dashed to the tunnel, from where he recalls looking out on the ensuing furore.
'No question I was scared, 100 per cent scared,' he says. 'I remember the tunnel was like a field hospital, there were people with cuts and bruises all round me. I stood there staring out at this mayhem thinking: 'What is happening to the game I love?' Everything seemed to be falling apart.'
Pleat's sense of doom was prescient. The riot presaged the darkest spring in English football history. The following month's FA Cup semi-final at Goodison Park between Manchester United and Liverpool was pockmarked with violence.
Then on May 11 came the horrific Bradford fire, in which 56 spectators perished as a discarded cigarette butt under the decrepit wooden stand at Valley Parade turned the place into an inferno. And on the same day, at a game between Birmingham and Leeds, a supporter was killed in all-enveloping hooliganism.
The nadir was reached at that season's European Cup final, club football's grandest occasion, when, in the not-fit-for-purpose Heysel Stadium in Brussels, 39 people were crushed to death after a stampede by Liverpool supporters.
'That spring it became very difficult for those of us who enjoyed the game to defend it against those who regarded it as some kind of aberration,' recalls the former MP David Mellor, who was then a junior minister in the Home Office. 'Certainly what happened at Luton made arguing the case in favour harder than ever.'
In a reminder of the fixture congestion that used to be caused by Cup replays, the game was scheduled on a Wednesday night after Luton had won the second replay of their fifth-round tie against Watford only the previous weekend, when the other three quarter-finals were staged.
According to Pleat, making the game an evening kick-off was the first significant error.
'It meant everyone could be drinking all day,' he says. 'Most of the problems in those days were at night games and involved drinking.'
With their club marooned in the third tier, the game presented Millwall fans with an outing to a then first-tier club. Given the speedy turnaround, there was not enough time to make the fixture all-ticket – it was simply a pay-on-the-gate operation. And hundreds more Millwall fans than expected turned up, many of them forcing their way in through decrepit turnstiles.
Their day out had started at St Pancras station, where the drinking had begun with breakfast. The collective boisterousness then manifested itself in the smashing up of one of the trains to Luton.
Arriving in the town, hundreds of inebriated visitors poured into the Arndale shopping centre, where shops were quickly obliged to lock their doors and put up the shutters.
On their way to Luton's stadium, which is bounded on all sides by terraced housing, the gathering hordes further signalled their intent by smashing windows and damaging parked cars.
Invasion of the Bobbers Stand
'I got to the ground an hour before kick-off and the Kenilworth Road stand, which was then the away end, was already full to bursting,' remembers Roger Wash, the Luton Town historian and chairman of Hatters Heritage. 'I was in the Bobbers Stand, which is alongside the away end, and well before the game got under way, some of them had jumped in there and were ripping up the seats.
'Loads of our fans had arrived, taken one look at what was going on, turned round and gone straight back home. So it was very sparsely populated in there. Until the away fans invaded it.'
George Graham, the Millwall manager, came over to the Bobbers and pleaded with the supporters to return to their section. It was at that point that Wash realised the visitors were not just supporters of Millwall.
'I was 33 years old, they weren't interested in the likes of me, so I just sat there as mayhem went on,' Wash recalls. 'And when Graham came over, there was this big yob standing right by me, smashing up a seat, who takes one look at him and goes: 'Who the hell is he?' It was obvious these were hooligans from Chelsea, Arsenal, West Ham, the lot, having a day out in the country.'
Graham's efforts made little difference. As the game kicked off, fans were still spilling from the overcrowded away stand first onto the touchline, then the playing surface itself.
'There were so many on the pitch the referee took both teams off after about 15 minutes,' recalls Pleat. 'He said to me and George that he was determined to get the game finished, but that if there was another invasion he would have to abandon it.'
That message was relayed via the public address system, and the pitch invaders gradually returned to the sidelines before, after a half-hour delay, things got back under way.
'I noticed as the game progressed, more and more fans were getting onto the touchline,' says Pleat. 'By the end, it was three or four deep. I was amazed we even got to full time.'
The Millwall supporters' mood was not enhanced by the fact Luton scored the only goal of the game. And the moment the final whistle went, as the referee and players dashed for safety, they poured on to the pitch, keen to confront the police, who, in the days before stewarding, provided the security at all football matches.
Looking back at the BBC footage shown on that evening's Sportsnight television programme, it is hard to miss the fact that many of the invaders were bouncing around in delight, giddy in their lawlessness.
'I was determined to watch the match to the end,' recalls Wash. 'But the moment the final whistle went I was out of there. I think that was the same for most Luton fans. Even our hooligans realised they were outnumbered, made a swift exit and left them to it.'
As the invaders charged across the pitch, the police were overwhelmed. One officer was knocked unconscious in the centre circle by a lump of concrete. A second officer attempting to deliver CPR on his stricken colleague, was also then assaulted, someone smacking him on the head with another chunk of rubble torn from the terraces.
'I'd just taken my team to the FA Cup semi-final, but there was no thought of celebrating,' Pleat recalls. 'My wife was up there in the main stand. I was terrified for her, as they were chucking things up there.'
Not just the pieces of the Bobbers Stand either; several snooker balls were recovered the next morning, weaponry brought along in anticipation of chaos.
Eventually, the police regrouped and managed to force the mob back on to the terrace and then out of the ground. The mess left behind was extensive and had real repercussions: a third of the regulars in the Bobbers Stand did not renew their season tickets the following season. Indeed, across the game everywhere, many a loyal supporter stopped turning up.
'It tarnished everything, no question about that,' says Pleat. 'We didn't get accolades, nobody noticed we'd got to the semi-final, the entire focus was rightly on the riot. In fact, my best spell as a manager coincided with the worst time for football.'
As they stood surveying the wreckage of the stadium after peace had been restored, Pleat remembers Graham confiding in him.
'He said to me he had to get out of there, meaning Millwall,' he says. 'He said Millwall were going to take all the blame, and his reputation would suffer.'
Graham was right to be concerned about the fall-out. A lengthy report on the next day's BBC evening news conveyed a sense of public outrage.
Pictures of the wreckage strewn across the pitch, of the smashed-up Bobbers Stand, of broken windows in the surrounding houses told a story of uncontrolled anarchy. It did not stop there: Wash recalls that members of the Luton hardcore gathered outside the town's Magistrates' Court the following morning to chase out of town the Millwall miscreants who were up in front of the beak.
Meanwhile in Downing Street, the prime minister moved into action.
'Margaret Thatcher just didn't get football,' Mellor suggests. 'She reckoned it was responsible for all the ills of society, particularly the bad reputation we had as a country overseas. She was at the height of her powers at this time, and there's no doubt she saw this as a chance to show her strength.'
Thatcher instructed her sports minister, Neil McFarlane, to make it clear to the Football Association that it had to come up with a plan to stop the tidal wave of violence enveloping the game. He gave the governing body just a week to do so. The organisation responded by insisting it could do nothing: this was a wider, societal issue beyond its remit or control.
'The problem was there were so many stupid people in charge with absolutely no clue how to resolve this,' says Mellor. 'I remember at a meeting that week at No10, Ted Croker [the FA secretary], who was a rather maladroit fellow, saying to Mrs Thatcher: 'We'd like your hooligans out of our game'. It went down, as you can imagine, like a lead balloon. Though I recall he did leave the room alive.'
Meanwhile David Evans, the Luton chairman and Tory MP for Welwyn and Hatfield, moved to apply some Thatcherite thinking to the issue. He announced a ban on away supporters at Kenilworth Road (which in turn led to the club's expulsion from the League Cup), the construction of more fencing to corral the crowd and a plan to introduce an identity card scheme.
'That was the fashionable solution,' says Mellor. 'But these membership schemes were not remotely realistic policies. The technology didn't exist. The idea of forcing people to prove who they were before they were let in: absolutely unworkable. Sadly, we were engaged in a dialogue of the deaf.'
A dialogue, as it turned out, that delivered nothing.
'I went to several committees at the House of Commons over the next few weeks, where the reception was not exactly welcoming,' says Pleat. 'A lot of MPs wanted to show how tough they were on football without actually doing anything.
'And the leadership of the game was very poor at the time, very weak. I never felt embarrassed about loving the game, because I knew what a force for good football could be if we got it right. The trouble was it took a lot worse to happen before we did.'
Taylor Report signalled long-awaited change
And worse was to come. Far worse. Nobody died at Luton. But many lives were lost over the next few weeks at Bradford, Birmingham and Heysel.
Football, and government, seemed completely incapable of responding effectively. Indeed it was not until the implementation of the Taylor Report following the Hillsborough disaster four years later, that proper change was finally signalled.
'He wasn't grandstanding, he had no fear of politics, and he came up with the most logical solution,' says Mellor of Lord Justice Taylor.
And Mellor adds, it was by making stadiums safe, welcoming spaces – as well as updating policing through the new technology of CCTV – that hooliganism could be expunged from the game.
'I remember saying to Dennis [Mrs Thatcher's husband] that maybe the thing to do was to make going to the match a pleasant thing to do. But it wasn't until after the Taylor Report that that started to happen. His report changed everything.' Not least the response to football in government.
'I remember it was only a few years after the Millwall riot,' says Mellor, 'that some of the very people who at that time slammed football as a scourge on society were ringing me up to say that their Little Jimmy is a big Chelsea fan and it's so difficult to get a ticket, could I help? Sometimes you despair.'
Mellor has a point. Back in March 1985, in the all-consuming pandemonium of Kenilworth Road, the very idea that going to the match could become a pleasurable pastime, never mind a fashionable one, seemed beyond fanciful.
'Whenever we play Millwall these days – and to be fair when we play anyone else – there are no issues at all,' says Wash. 'Those days are gone. Thank God.'