There were 112,838 people at MCG for the 1970 second semi-final. As one of the shorter ones, I watched from a platform of four steel beer cans, filled with urine to stabilise them. This dealt with two urgent needs in one, for whoever supplied the necessary fluid would have had no chance in that crowd of getting to the toilets, which were foully awash anyway.

At match's end, the cans and many others were sent clattering down the concrete terraces, their contents trickling after them. I thought nothing in particular of these arrangements; it was the way of things then.

Elsetimes that season, I sensed rather than saw games at waist-height in a lumpen mass of adults on a dirt terrace at the Yarra Falls end at Victoria Park, a little jealous of the tightly packed throng perched on top of a nearby toilet block, because at least they had a view. I thought nothing of this, either. Always, there was the malodour of beer and urine. If I wrinkle my nose a little, I can smell it still. Ah, the good old days.

These memories came wafting back this week, firstly on a return trip to Victoria Park - now genteelly transformed - and upon reading the findings of the inquiry into the Hillsborough Stadium tragedy in which 96 Liverpool fans were suffocated to death 27 years ago.

On the day, police had accused fans of breaking down a gate. In fact, police had ordered the gate to be opened, alleviating a crush outside in narrow Leppings Lane, but creating a worse one inside. Nearly three decades and any number of inquisitions later, the police have been held fully accountable and the families of victims given some peace.

This, remember, was the good old days. In much police testimony, there was reference to "tanked-up yobbos" and the smell of beer, with obvious implications as to cause. This became a kind of official line, first promulgated that night by police talking to reporters - over many beers - at their social club. It was splashed across the front page of The Sun under the headline "The Truth" and recurred, among other places, in an extraordinarily callous and dismissive letter from Sir Bernard Ingham, press secretary to prime minister Margaret Thatcher, to Liverpool fans agitating for justice. This characterisation rankles still.

Even the first inquiry, convened in the month of the tragedy, found that a drunken minority was an exacerbating factor, but not the cause. So did the latest.

They were beery, beery days. At the cricket in Australia, there was no limit. When one eventually was set, it was 24 (full-strength only) cans at a time, and it was unclear whether that was a maximum or a goal. Spectating, winter or summer, could be a comparatively primitive experience and prompts wonder that nothing like Hillsborough has been visited upon Australia. It is a blessing worth counting.

Why not here? It is not as if we didn't and don't have crowds. AFL is in the top four sports in the world for average attendances. Here's some possibilities. More expansive scale: Footy arenas are larger than soccer's, and consequently so are the stadiums, and even in the suburban days, most were set in or adjacent to parklands. There were no Leppings Lanes. Most stadiums were kept in modestly good repair, unlike those at Bradford City and Heysel in Belgium, scenes of previous high-casualty tragedies in 1985 that still were vivid in soccer minds at the time. Mercifully, statutorily habitable stadiums are one direct consequence of Hillsborough.

Social dynamics: The miners' strike was recent and sore history, hooligansim was the epidemic of the times, and mistrust between police and working-class football fans was high. There was no parallel here (though oddly enough, policing of A-League crowds appears to begin from an unfortunate position of mutual suspicion). Tradition: Because reserves games were played as curtain-raisers in footy then, the arrival of fans was staggered over a couple of hours. At Hillsborough, they came late and in a rush. Authorities should have been prepared for this, but were not.

Culture: Much as we like to think of our code as tribal, it is even more social. At a Fitzroy-Collingwood game one day while still in primary school, I was upset by a gaggle of men in front of me barracking rabidly against the Magpies. Asked by my father to tone it down, they readily agreed. "We're Essendon supporters anyway," said one. Many years later, another group of Essendon supporters congratulated my then pre-school son on the heartiness of his barracking. It was easy for them to be so generous; they'd won!

By and large, we've been spared the array of forces - some malign, some inept, some aggravated, most incidental - that put so many Liverpool fans in the wrong space at the wrong time that gruesome day in 1989. That is not to gloat, but to be grateful. It is also to caution against relaxing our guard. The experience of going to the football has changed out of all recognition in both countries since Hillsborough, but what is so obvious in images from that day is still true in this, that a mob has a mind of its own, insensible to the mind of any of the individuals who make it up, sometimes catastrophically so.