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There were ramifications to what Simmons and Cantona did that night’ – the rarely-told story of the death of Paul Nixon
At first glance, the red and blue Crystal Palace flag fluttering over the garage door feels incongruous. This is Walsall, after all. The Bescot Stadium is less than a mile away. There are replica shirts pinned to the weather-beaten woodwork too, one dating from a decade ago, its badge faded, and the other only two seasons old. Scarves frame the scene. For those driving down Weston Street to its junction with Broadway, it must seem an oddity. A corner of south London mystifyingly deposited in the distant West Midlands.
The curious on foot can venture closer for an explanation of sorts. Just to the left of the metallic door, almost camouflaged by the drab brickwork, is a brass plaque bearing a simple inscription.
“In memory of Paul Nixon, CPFC, who died here 9-4-95. RIP. From all his mates.”
The elements have clearly taken their toll on the metalwork given it was only polished up a little over a year ago when a group of locals gathered by Matty Lovatt, now the manager of non-league Dudley Town, took it upon themselves to spruce up the memorial site. It had been littered with spent betting slips from the neighbouring bookies and bottles from the New Fullbrook pub, two doors down. There were even used syringes in among the overgrown bushes and pulped leaves.
“It was in a state, through no fault of the lads all the way down in London,” says Lovatt. “What could they do? People had been fly-tipping in front of the garage and the council had done nothing because it was technically private land. I’d drive past and just thought it was unacceptable. That we should do something.
“I didn’t know Paul. I only vaguely remember the incident itself all those years ago, and the shock and sorrow it caused in this area, but he was a member of the football community. I felt a kind of duty to Paul and his mates to do something about it. So a group of us, probably 15 all in, arranged to come down and clear it all. The majority were Walsall fans, but some were Aston Villa, Wolves or West Brom. There was a Palace fan, too, who lives locally and brought along one of the scarves. We’re just proud of our local community, proud of this town. We wanted Paul’s family and friends to know the memorial is being looked after. I put myself in their position: if that had been my friend, I’d like to think someone would have done the same for me.”
The clear-up was undertaken in the run-up to Christmas 13 months ago, with one eye on Palace’s scheduled game at Molineux a few weeks later. Nixon’s friends have made a habit of stopping off on away days in the Midlands and north west, an annual pilgrimage to pay their respects to a mate. They have done so for a quarter of a century.
“It looks more befitting now,” adds Lovatt. “It’s a constant reminder about Paul, who went to watch a football match and never came home. His is such a sad story, and not the straight case of football hooliganism a lot of people tend to assume. They just dismiss it as two rival factions clashing. I know differently.
“Paul and that coach-load of Palace fans had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And there’s absolutely no doubt whatsoever in my mind that the Manchester United fans involved in the trouble were geed on by the thought they were on some kind of revenge mission over the Eric Cantona incident from a few months before.”
Nixon’s story is difficult to tell. It is harder still for his friends and family to hear and, at times, they have been uncomfortable when modern-day supporters have started songs or unfurled banners referencing his death, in the hours before the FA Cup semi-final at Villa Park back in April 1995.
Yet the reminders may be inevitable in the days ahead. Saturday marked the 25th anniversary of Cantona’s kung-fu kick on Matthew Simmons, a Palace supporter who had run down 11 rows to the front of the family enclosure near the tunnel at Selhurst Park to scream abuse at the Frenchman following his dismissal for a frustrated kick at his marker, Richard Shaw.
Cantona’s rush of blood is infamous. It cost him more than £20,000 in fines, a two-week jail sentence for common assault that was subsequently commuted to community service, and a nine-month ban from football, but it added to his legend. He returned to inspire successive league titles and an FA Cup win. In 2012, in an interview with the BBC, he claimed through a smile that his “kung-fu on the hooligan” was the personal highlight of his career, albeit subsequently admitting it was “a mistake”. Regardless, he remains idolised at Old Trafford. He was a mercurial talent on the pitch, wildly unpredictable but capable of majesty, who had propelled Sir Alex Ferguson’s first great United team to major honours.
He never played against Palace again but, even now, his name tends to be chorused whenever the teams meet. In 2005, ahead of what was then a rare Premier League fixture between the sides in south London and only a few weeks after the tenth anniversary of the striker’s livid reaction, it emerged that visiting fans planned to attend wearing Cantona masks and T-shirts. They were duly warned they would be ejected from the stadium “on safety grounds” if they did so. Plenty found Palace’s apparent overreaction unfathomable at the time.
Yet those masks had been deemed inflammatory for a reason.
“We’d never really had a problem with United before the Cantona and Simmons incident, but they started off a chain of events that contributed to a man’s death,” says Neil Witherow, a former Palace fanzine editor and a supporter of 50 years. “Go back and Palace had contributed to a stained glass window in Duncan Edwards’ local church as a mark of respect after the Munich air crash. I have pictures of me from the FA Cup final in 1990 with my arm round United fans at Wembley. There was no bother between us.
“We’d unfurled a ‘good luck’ banner for them the following year ahead of their UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup final against Barcelona when they came to Selhurst towards the end of the season. I was working in the Family Enclosure at the time. I remember the banner because I had to drag it around the pitch while dressed as one of the mascots.
“No, that game in 2005 was a matter of weeks from the anniversary of the Cantona kick, but also of Paul Nixon’s death. We’d heard about the masks and the T-shirts, and knew they were planning it. By all means, celebrate one of your best players. But don’t do it here. Not at Palace. It was all done to provoke a reaction.
“I still can’t reconcile the fact that United fans don’t think there’s a link between one idiot jumping into the stand to kick another idiot – I’m not seeking to defend Matthew Simmons here – and what happened in Walsall a few months later. I don’t understand how they can suggest that was just random football violence. It wasn’t random at all.
“I’m not saying people set out to kill somebody, but they ended up having a fight in which somebody died. Was it a direct result of that incident in Selhurst Park a few months previously? Yes, it absolutely was. The poisonous atmosphere around the game at Villa Park all stemmed from that. All the banners in the United end, the ‘Eric was airborne’ nonsense playing on the Nike advertising campaign that was running at the time. The aggro around the ground. The undercurrent of hostility. We didn’t have that animosity before the game that February.”
The two teams had been drawn against each other in that FA Cup semi-final, to be staged at a neutral venue in the West Midlands. Nixon was one of around 35 Palace fans, including children, on a coach that left the Cunningham pub in New Addington and headed north that Sunday afternoon. Some in their number already boasted friends among Walsall’s support, born of mixing while following England, and, with alcohol consumption illegal on board, the plan had always been to stop off at the New Fullbrook pub around half an hour’s drive from Villa Park.
The publican, a Wolves fan who had grown to know the Palace contingent over the previous eight years, welcomed them. “If a bunch of skinheads turn up at your pub shouting racial abuse, you have a right to expect trouble,” licensee Sam Wilkes later told the local Express & Star newspaper. “But when a coach-load of respectable football fans with their wives and children arrive, the last thing you expect is any problems.”
Yet he had not anticipated a coach-load of United fans, who had opted against their designated turn-off travelling south on the M6, pulling up shortly afterwards. The inquest into Nixon’s death was later told that the group had been made aware by a local businessman almost two weeks previously that Palace fans tended to drink pre-match at the New Fullbrook when in the area. The coroner, who would argue there should be bans placed on coaches stopping at pubs en route to and from games, concluded that they had welcomed the idea that opposing supporters would be in situ upon their arrival.
For a while, the groups apparently drank harmoniously enough on either side of the bar. But the atmosphere steadily changed, growing uglier with regular chants of Cantona’s name. “I was in the toilet when a Manchester United fan asked if I was the bloke that hit Cantona,” Palace fan Gary Carter told the inquest. (Simmons was fined £500 and banned from entering football stadiums for 12 months for using threatening words and behaviour, but has always denied they were racist.)
“I told him it wasn’t me and left it at that, but he turned to his mate and said: ‘We’ll sort it out later.’”
It was at around 3pm, with Palace fans drifting back to their coach outside before heading off to Villa Park for the tea-time kick-off, that the violence began in the car park. The coroner, Aidan Cotter, described what ensued as “10 minutes of hell”.
Bottles, glasses and rocks were flung between the rival groups outside the pub. A low wall was kicked over and bricks thrown at the Palace coach, breaking windows and smashing the windscreen. Nixon, a former road-mender, and Dennis O’Leary, a hod carrier from Thornton Heath, had been slightly behind the main group leaving the pub and stumbled into a hail of missiles. O’Leary was knocked to the ground and a concrete slab was then dropped on to his head.
He suffered fractured cheek bones, a broken nose and a shattered jaw. His mouth was split in three places. He underwent surgery at Wolverhampton’s Royal hospital, spent almost a week unconscious and wore a head brace for a month. He still attends games now, and was later quoted as saying: “The people who attacked me were not football fans.”
Nixon was less fortunate. With the driver panicked, the coach windows smashing all around him, the 35-year-old from New Addington had been attempting to climb on to the moving bus when he was struck on the head by a brick. He stumbled under the rear wheels of the vehicle. Despite the best efforts of Kelly Downing – a local student who had just completed a first-aid course, and who had emerged from her house across the road in a bid to help – plus one of the United fans and a police officer, who attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Nixon passed away close to where his memorial now stands.
Colin Hoare had known Nixon since they were children back in Fieldway, New Addington, around the corner from where Aaron Wan-Bissaka later grew up, and had been in Walsall with his friend that day. The pair had done everything together. “Paul was a diamond,” he tells The Athletic. “He’d do anything for anyone. He had a terrific sense of humour, worked hard. We got into scrapes, but most kids do, don’t they? He was just a diamond. We were inseparable: we worked together, drank together, wherever he was, I went too. Losing him that afternoon ripped half my heart away. He was my best pal, and I lost him.”
The four-day inquest into his death, held in Walsall in mid-June 1996 over a year after the incident, issued a verdict of unlawful killing. Home Office pathologist Dr Kenneth Scott said Nixon, a father of three, had died from multiple injuries caused by the coach wheels, but had suffered other injuries prior to his death. There were cuts and bruises to his head, a black eye, a fractured skull and a broken jaw, as well as damage to the liver, right lung and spleen. There was an ugly stab wound to his left thigh. Witnesses suggested it had been inflicted with one of the reinforcement rods from the wall that had been kicked down.
“Mr Nixon was either stabbed with a weapon or fell onto something sharp to cause that wound,” said Dr Scott, slightly more cautiously. “If these injuries had happened before, they would have been sufficient to render him unconscious.”
The testimonies heard at the inquest were harrowing. Police officers spoke of bricks and bottles still raining down even as they attempted to help the wounded. “One fan, Mr O’Leary, was left lying in a pool of ever widening blood,” said coroner Cotter. “He was literally bleeding to death. A group of pensioners saw a group laughing while standing over a man lying at their feet. Whoever threw a brick, bottle, lump of concrete at that coach that Sunday afternoon is personally and directly responsible for Paul Nixon’s death and they have to live with that knowledge. I hope it hurts them.”
Yet by the time the coroner was issuing his verdict of unlawful killing, a £500,000 police investigation had already run aground. Three people had been arrested in the immediate aftermath of the clash, with statements gathered from more than 100. The Crown Prosecution Service subsequently gave the go-ahead for 13 cases to be prosecuted over the riot, with manslaughter charges brought against three men.
But in February 1996, the Wolverhampton stipendiary magistrate Ian Gillespie threw out the case after a committal hearing in Walsall having determined that Steven Rimmer, Neil Spence and Ian Spence, all of Irlam, Manchester, had no case to answer. Lesser charges of violent disorder against all three defendants, and wounding with intent against the Spence brothers, were also thrown out.
Cotter, in his subsequent inquest, would express surprise that only one Palace fan had been listed to give prosecution evidence in the court cases. “The investigation went on for about three months before we were happy there were no other avenues we could go down,” said Detective Superintendent John Plimmer, head of Walsall CID, at the time. “Then it was down to the CPS. We had brought grievous bodily harm and serious public order charges. We never thought we would get manslaughter, so I wasn’t surprised the stipendiary magistrate found there was insufficient evidence. The problem was that we got so much information that a lot of the statements conflicted.”
He subsequently indicated a willingness to pursue further legal action, particularly after the coroner’s verdict. “Nobody was acquitted,” he told the Croydon Advertiser in the summer of 1996. “The case was thrown out on a technicality, so it is still very much alive.” Except nothing was ever pursued. No one was ever convicted of Nixon’s death, or of the injuries inflicted upon O’Leary. The perpetrators were never brought to justice.
The period immediately after the riot was strained, the fall-out fractious. The teams drew the semi-final 2-2, with the watching world largely oblivious to the events in Walsall in the hours before the game, though the stalemate necessitated a replay at Villa Park three days later. Palace were outraged, the director Colin Noades – brother of the chairman, Ron – calling for a postponement “out of respect for the relations of the supporter who died, but also to allow for a calming period”. The MP for Walsall South, Bruce George, echoed that after visiting the scene, and urged the Football Association to hold any replay at a far-flung ground, “preferably in Reykjavik”.
As it was, the FA, backed by West Midlands Police, determined it would be better for the game to be staged sooner rather than later. Palace claimed they had not even received a reply to their correspondence on the matter, and had received no assurances from the police that extra officers would be drafted in.
So the board called upon the club’s supporters to boycott the replay, a move somewhat bizarrely criticised by Aston Villa secretary Steve Stride, who claimed Palace “have behaved abysmally”. Only around 2,000 of the Londoners’ allocated 16,000 tickets were taken up to leave the ground less than half full, with the game played out in an eerie atmosphere as a result.
“The poor lad that died… the supporters didn’t go, Ron didn’t go, nor did any of our directors,” the Palace manager at the time, Alan Smith, tells The Athletic. “Alex Ferguson was quite decent about it. We hadn’t spoken on the phone in the build-up to the game but someone had put forward this idea of talking to the fans before the match and, when we got to the ground, he came up to me and said: ‘Look, I’m really sorry to hear what’s happened. I know your directors aren’t here this evening, but would it be a good idea for us to go out and show that the teams, themselves, are together?’”
The managers took up microphones and addressed the crowd from the pitch prior to kick-off, calling for calm. United eventually eased to a straightforward victory, for all that the occasion was blighted by Roy Keane’s stamp on Gareth Southgate’s chest near the touchline. Keane and the Palace defender Darren Patterson, for retaliation, were sent off. The incident felt pathetic in the context of the occasion.
The clubs would go on to spend the best part of the next 18 years competing in different divisions, their top-flight meetings only ever fleeting.
The Premier League had initially feared Cantona’s kung-fu kick might tarnish their image, bringing the game into such disrepute, but subscriptions to Sky Sports actually spiked to then-record highs in the week after the incident. The Sun had dedicated 13 pages, including the splash, to “The Shame of Cantona” two days after the clash. Over time, his actions have taken on even more seismic implications for some, whether they consider him a charismatic pantomime villain or a heroic victim literally attempting to kick racism out of football.
“But for those of us who remember what happened next, there will never be anything comical or even romantic about that incident,” adds Witherow. “As a fanzine editor, I was asked to go on a Premier League panel organised by Sky in 2004, looking back at the league’s greatest moments. They’d put Cantona and Simmons in as one of their top 10. I refused to take part and walked out, and a few of the other guys from other clubs – all clubs of a similar size to Palace – came with me, too, as an act of solidarity.
“You can’t celebrate something like that. Cantona should never be lauded for kicking out as he did. There were ramifications to what Simmons and he did that night. That should never be forgotten.”
Originally Posted by dembethewarrior
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