“I was just coming towards the end of writing what was a positive, upbeat overview of the whole day,” Andy Hunter, a Guardian football correspondent based in Liverpool, tells Helen Pidd. “Wrote about how they were memories that would last a lifetime. And then just as I was finishing that and about to send it, I got a call from the desk to say, have you seen what’s just happened? And then everything turned in an instant.”
On Monday evening, a car ploughed through crowds of people leaving the Liverpool FC parade. Hundreds of thousands of people had lined the streets to celebrate the team’s Premier League win.
Merseyside police confirmed that more than 50 people were injured and treated in hospital, where 11 remain. The force said a 53-year-old white British man from the Liverpool area was arrested at the scene and the incident was not being treated as terrorism.
“Four children were injured,” Hunter says. “But there were so many kids there yesterday. It was a family occasion. It was a chance for kids, who wouldn’t get the opportunity to go to Anfield, to get a ticket to Anfield and see their heroes in the flesh, to actually see Mo Salah with the Premier League trophy, and, as I say, memories that last a lifetime, and then it’s just destroyed in an instant.”
Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod
