Turin (Italy) (AFP) – Every year thousands gather at the Basilica of Superga overlooking Turin to commemorate the memory of Italian football’s all-conquering ‘Grande Torino’ team who were wiped out in an air disaster.
This year, Englishman Bill Lievesley will be among them to mark the 70th anniversary of the tragedy which claimed the lives of 31 people including his father Leslie Lievesley, the team coach, among 18 players and officials.
The team known as the Invincibles, winners of five Serie A titles in a row, formed the backbone of the Italian national team at the time.
They were returning from a match against Benfica in Lisbon, when their plane crashed in foggy and cloudy conditions into the Superga hill overlooking Turin.
“Outside of Italy most people have never heard about the Torino disaster – the only football disaster they know about is the Manchester United one,” Lievesley told AFP before travelling to northern Italy from his home in England.
“It’s as if people now seem to have found out about it,” he said.
“I certainly didn’t forget about it because it completely changed my life around.”
Bill was just ten when his 37-year-old father, a former Manchester United and Crystal Palace defender, was killed.
Incredibly Leslie had previously survived three air crashes, two with the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, and a third with the Torino youth team, at Turin airport.
Lievesley arrived in Torino in 1947, coaching alongside Holocaust survivor Erno Egri Erbstein from Hungary, having first trained Dutch side Heracles Almelo after the war.
Bill recalls returning home on May 4, 1949 and his mother Nellie telling him “people are saying that there has been a plane crash”.
“Nobody believed it had happened until several hours later,” recalls Bill, an 80-year-old retired engineer with the National Health Service.
“It was a terrible day with low cloud and poor visibility, the plane went into the hill. It was like I was moving about in a bit of a dream for a while.”
On Saturday, he will attend the commemoration ceremony along with his partner Wendy and daughters Joanne and Susan, as he did ten years ago.
Mirella Loik and Franco Ossola, whose fathers, midfielder Ezio Loik, and forward Franco Ossola, also died, will also be present.
Before that Bill had never returned, moving back to England because his mother wanted his father to be buried in the same churchyard as his family in Washington, five miles (eight kilometres) from Doncaster.
from World Soccer Talk http://bit.ly/2Wsezi5
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