'Something inside me died that night'

"Something inside me died," observed Michel Platini when asked, in Heysel's immediate aftermath, how it felt to play a game of football in a place of death. It was Platini whose penalty won Juventus a final shrouded in sadness. The great Frenchman, who has designs on the Uefa presidency when Lennart Johansson retires next year, has spoken seldom about Heysel, but looking back from a distance of 20 years, he defends his show of joy when he scored that night. "I didn't remember that there was some problem. I was just thinking that we could win the cup for our fans, for our city, for everybody," he says. "I was not thinking about the trouble. It is easy to sit in the stand with the press and say, 'That is not good' but when you play, it is different."

"Something inside me died," observed Michel Platini when asked, in Heysel's immediate aftermath, how it felt to play a game of football in a place of death. It was Platini whose penalty won Juventus a final shrouded in sadness. The great Frenchman, who has designs on the Uefa presidency when Lennart Johansson retires next year, has spoken seldom about Heysel, but looking back from a distance of 20 years, he defends his show of joy when he scored that night. "I didn't remember that there was some problem. I was just thinking that we could win the cup for our fans, for our city, for everybody," he says. "I was not thinking about the trouble. It is easy to sit in the stand with the press and say, 'That is not good' but when you play, it is different."

Heysel should have been the crowning moment in a black and white shirt for Platini, then 29, because Juventus had never won the European Cup but he insists that he and his team-mates did not know the full scale of the horror. "At the beginning we heard there was a problem in the stadium but at that time it was not unusual," he says. They knew there were "one or two dead people" but little more, and they were not alone in that. My father, who was in the stadium, also didn't know what happened. He found out what had happened the day after when he heard the news on the radio. All the people watching on TV knew more than the people in the stadium."

According to the recently retired Uefa chief executive, Gerhard Aigner, Platini was opposed to playing. Platini remembers it differently: "Our president asked us to play the game. I think it was very important to play. If we hadn't played it would have been worse. I am sure it would have been worse - if the people in the stadium, the Italians, had known there were so many dead, they would have sought revenge. It was better that we played."

The desperate circumstances "did not affect what happened on the pitch", however, and Platini stresses: "The victory was not meaningless, both teams played to win." His second-half penalty-kick was awarded by the referee Andre Daina for a foul by Gary Gillespie on Zbigniew Boniek, that occurred outside the box. A report on Belgian television afterwards claimed the referee was under pressure to facilitate an Italian success, but Platini, whose pass released the Pole, says: "If I'd been the referee I'd have given it too. Boniek was 60 metres away and he was going too quickly."

The days that followed were painfully real. "It was very difficult when I got back to Turin, it was a difficult period and I returned two days after to the hospital in Brussels to visit Italian people there." Asked to remark on his original quote, he concludes: "Something inside me died, yes. I don't play football to see 39 people dead in the stadium - this is not my philosophy of football."

Michel Platini made 147 appearances for Juventus between 1982 and 1987. This article, by Simon Hart, was extracted from the May issue of Esquire magazine.