It was just a few minutes into Liverpool's first game at Kenilworth Road for 15 years when a terrace anthem as outdated as it is familiar greeted the supporters in the away end.

"Sign on! Sign on!" crowed the Luton Town fans in hideous fashion. It's a football chant that has its roots firmly in stereotypes of the 1980s but if it was one that would have made eyes roll from a Liverpool perspective, the next one made them recoil in disgust.

"Always the victims, it's never your fault."

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Songs about the Hillsborough disaster have become depressingly all too common for the people of Merseyside. Having been forced to listen to them from the likes of Manchester City and Nottingham Forest followers last year, Luton Town's fans decided it was a fight they wanted to take on too during the opening exchanges of Sunday's 1-1 draw.

The speed at which the fans of a team who hadn't played Liverpool in a league game at Kenilworth Road since 1991 launched into tragedy chanting was jarring. English football has come a long way since the Reds' most recent league visit 32 years ago but it seems some attitudes remain firmly entrenched in that bygone, pre-Premier League era.

To his credit, the chants were called out live on air by Sky Sports pundit and Liverpool legend Jamie Carragher, who remarked: “At the start of the season, I was involved in something about tragedy chanting and supporters coming together. I have just heard something a couple of times in this game. Supporters have got to have rivalry but we are better than that. A lot of clubs have been guilty of that over the years but football fans are better than that."

It has become far too easy to flippantly slip into a trope that brands Liverpool fans as "victims" - a loaded term that refers back to the Hillsborough disaster - and 34 years on from the darkest day in the club's history, there will be grown adults with families of their own who were not even born in April 1989. They are the ones who are ignorantly unaware of the harm they are doing.

More worryingly, there are those who simply don't care or even choose to challenge the offence and distress felt by those impacted by the horrendous events in the Leppings Lane end all those years ago.

Luton's rise to the Premier League has been a generally encouraging development in recent years and their willingness to bloody the nose of some of the biggest clubs in the country - like Liverpool - has been a welcome new subplot to the top flight this season. But plenty of their supporters let them and their club down on Sunday afternoon. They will know who they are and like Jurgen Klopp said at full-time, they should hang their head in shame.

"Every fan base has been guilty at one time or another of tragedy chanting," added Carragher on Twitter on Sunday. "This is not about point scoring between fans, it’s about football fans coming together as one & saying enough is enough & that this is not acceptable anymore."

At the start of the 2021/22 campaign, Liverpool arranged a sit-down with Paul Amann of Kop Outs - Liverpool's preeminent LGBT+ fans' group - in an attempt to educate on why certain chanting around Chelsea players needed to end following a song that was aimed at Billy Gilmour, who was at Norwich City while on loan from the Londoners at the time.

Those derogatory chants have now quietened in the two years since with Liverpool supporters largely heeding the message, but rather than some people within rival fanbases doing similar regarding the connotations around the 'Always the Victims' slurs, it is one that remarkably continues to be aired and even excused.

It's not about Hillsborough, stop playing the victim, goes the pathetic, wafer-thin defence. It's gaslighting.

The only way to truly eradicate such heinous attempts to gain a rise is for the football authorities to implement banning orders for those found to be guilty of taking part. This is not a chant that falls under the wider grounds of 'football banter' - it is one that seeks to hurt those who it affects.

That cannot be right. It isn't banter and it needs to end now.