The Professional Footballers’ Association chief executive, Gordon Taylor, has sparked anger and risked offending the families of those who died at Hillsborough by comparing their plight to that of the convicted rapist Ched Evans.
Taylor, who has backed the right of Evans to return to football after the striker was released on licence after serving half of a five-year sentence, was attempting to make a point about miscarriages of justice when he made the crass comparison.
“He wouldn’t be the first person or persons to be found guilty and maintain their innocence and then been proven right,” he told the BBC. “If we’re talking about things in football we know what happened, what was alleged to have happened, at Hillsborough and it’s now unravelling and we’re finding it was very different to how it was portrayed at the time, indeed by the police at the time.”
By mentioning the disaster that killed 96 people attending the Liverpool v Nottingham Forest FA Cup semi-final in April 1989 in the same context as Evans’ protestations of innocence and the referral of his case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, Taylor provoked a furious response on Twitter, with calls for him to quit.
After the report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel into the disaster, the high court ordered a new inquest. That inquest is ongoing in Warrington before the coroner Lord Justice Goldring, with families of those who were killed attending to sit through the evidence.
Taylor said that Evans had been left in a “very difficult situation” following Oldham Athletic’s decision not to sign the former Sheffield United striker.
Evans has maintained his innocence since being found guilty of rape in April 2012 following a night out in Rhyl but expressed an element of contrition for the first time in a statement released on Thursday as it emerged Oldham Athletic would not be signing him.
“He’s been put through a wringer and the moment you show sympathy for Ched, everybody will say: ‘What about the other parties concerned?’ And that’s why I’m making the point that nobody is forgetting them,” said Taylor. “He’s looking to keep himself fit at the moment. This Oldham situation’s not made things any better for him, so it may well take some time now.
“But he is a human being, he is one of our members, and we are a civilised society and the rule of law is about having done your time, and he’s been asked to show some remorse which, he’s always been in the hands of lawyers when it’s very delicate on the things he’s said, and every word has to be checked, because of the situation he’s in.”
Taylor has been chief executive of the PFA since 1981 and has been the forthright public face of the organisation for most of that time. He has consistently argued that Evans deserves the right to return to football.
