Tribune has published my review of The Last Game, Jason Cowleys' book on the 1989 Liverpool v Arsenal title decider and the cultural changes it presaged (review in full below).
I found the book strangely apolitical, considering it was written by the editor of The New Statesman, and generally neutral about the then Thatcher government.
But Cowley does a great job in bringing the game back to life and also writes movingly about his father. However I've yet to find a Liverpool fan ready to take up my offer to borrow the book!
I REMEMBER that London had that slightly fetid air it has after a day of constant sun. I’d gone to a party with some friends and the host had been miffed, obviously, that we wanted to watch the television. But you had to watch the match, even if it did seem like a lost cause.
Afterwards a few of us ran a couple of miles to Highbury and partied outside the ground. I was on the bonnet of a car singing songs when a kindly policeman, smiling and indulgent, suggested I might like to get down.
Jason Cowley’s new book about the Football League title-deciding match in 1989 between Liverpool and Arsenal at Anfield certainly stirs the memories, but The Last Game is not an exercise in nostalgia.
For Liverpool fans, that period remains all too bitter. As we’ve been reminded recently, 1989 was also the year of the Hillsborough tragedy. And Liverpool were soon to be overtaken by Manchester United as the pre-eminent force in British football.
Margaret Thatcher was celebrating ten years in Downing Street blissfully unaware that within 18 months she, too, would be deposed from the top. It was also the year that Rupert Murdoch launched Sky TV, the success of which was built on the millions of pounds it poured into buying football television rights. That torrent of cash, along with the Taylor report, utterly changed the game. Football is now consumed rather than enjoyed.
If you are looking for a period of change – for football and for politics – then 1989 is a pretty good year to pick. For Cowley, as for most fans, football is a very personal love affair and this is the third element of his book – The Last Game is also an honest and moving memoir about Cowley’s relationship with his West Ham-supporting working class dad.
Any book about Arsenal and the nature of men will, of course, be compared with Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch. But The Last Game has a much more ambitious scope. As a former editor of The Observer’s excellent Sport Monthly (Cowley is now editor of the New Statesman) you would expect the passages about the footie to be the strongest parts. But it is in fact the personal story which stands out.
The political elements say little new and Cowley gives Thatcher far too easy a time although this might be because the young Cowley was more interested in the apolitical rave scene when he wasn’t on the terraces.
As for the football, well, Cowley’s telling of the game itself is masterful and his pen portraits of the Arsenal players involved are well drawn. His Liverpool material is weaker. Cowley quotes footballer-turned-pundit Jamie Redknapp for his opinion on John Barnes. Personally, there is a very, very long queue of people in front of Jamie Redknapp whose views I would be more interested in. The interviews are hardly revelatory and the final chapter on the state of football today says little of surprise to any football fan.
There are too few books which attempt to put our national obsession into a political context and, despite these reservations, The Last Game is a highly readable and at times very moving exploration of a period of football that has now gone forever.
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