ONE of the spectators sitting in the stand that dreadful day would go on the become Bradford City captain. For Lee Duxbury the things he witnessed then will never leave him.

He said: “I’ve kept quiet about it for all these years. People tell their stories and I can to relate to them, but I’ve never been asked about it so I haven’t said anything.

“Me and my Mum were there with Mark Evans, who was a goalkeeper. We were sitting about four seats away from where the smoke was first seen. We went to get a coffee just before half-time and in the couple of minutes it took us to get up the stairs to the back the flames were above us.

“We had to make a decision, it was pure panic. We were a long way from the pitch, on the left hand side of the tunnel near the doors that were locked. There was an entrance every 30 yards and we fought our way over rows and rows of seats and through gates.

“We got down to the paddock at the bottom of the main stand and there was a ten foot drop and everyone was throwing themselves over. The players were helping people down and it was Ade Thorpe, the winger, that helped me over and once you got over you pulled the others to safety but even on the pitch the heat was horrific.

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“I was playing for the youth team at the time and was just a kid, I signed under the Youth Training Scheme the year after.”

Being a teenager at the time Duxbury didn’t realise the full implications of what had happened or grasp the magnitude of the disaster. It has sunk in over many years and he knows just how lucky he and his fellow survivors were.

“It was the worst fire disaster at a football ground and it led to changes in legislation on safety not just in England but all over Europe. My Mum was badly shaken by it right there, she knew right away how bad it was. But I don’t think, until you have kids of your own, that you see the dangers, so it was much later when it affected me.

“It only got to me when I got to the old police station opposite the Alhambra for the reconstruction. It was about a month after the fire and they had all the seats set out like the block where it started, the one we were in.

“They told us to go and sit where we’d been on the day. All the seats had question marks on them and they only removed them when they knew whoever had been sitting there was safe.

“It wasn’t a massive reconstruction and me and my Mum realised that we must have been right there, right where it started. There were still a lot of question marks on the seats near us – we knew how lucky we’d been.”

That part of the tragedy has played on Duxbury’s mind for all these years, like the heavy burden of guilt that survivors often suffer from. He was relieved that, as a player, they didn’t have to return to Valley Parade after the close season.

The club played its games at Huddersfield Town, Leeds United and Bradford Northern's Odsal stadium, even the FA Youth Cup in which Duxbury played the following season. But the sights from that fateful day are still crystal clear in his mind.

“Unfortunately for me I can remember a group of kids, probably from a school party or something like that. They were sitting just in front of us and they were in high spirits. The girls among them weren’t interested much but they were laughing and messing and talking about anything but the game. To this day I wonder what happened to them all.

“We made a life decision but we didn’t know it at the time. We went the long way round. We were only yards away from the doors at the back of the stand but about 60 yards from the pitch.

“But that’s the way we went and we got out. It was like a nightmare and with the adrenalin of the panic you used brute force to get over seats and through gaps. There was one particular place where we had to squeeze through barriers. Evo (Mark Evans) got through, I pushed my Mum through and then I got through. I still get flashbacks of that.

“Me and Evo were allowed tickets, as schoolboys all the youth players were and we were down there every home game. We didn’t think that day would be any different.”

The speed at which the fire spread surprised Duxbury and he felt a sense of incredulity as it unfolded.

“It went up in minutes,” he said, “there were a lot of lucky people. The stadium went up so quickly it was scary. In the time it took us to walk about ten yards up the steps the flames were all around and above us.

“It wasn’t like it was real. It wasn’t until we got onto the pitch and looked back that it hit us just how bad it was. What if the wind had been blowing the other way? It would have been full of smoke on the pitch and even more people might have died.

“It usually did blow the other way, into the Midland Road stand but that day it didn’t.”