Last Game

Jason Cowley
The last game
Love, death and football
New York, Simon & Schuster, 2009
Anteprima | Recensioni

A compelling memoir of how one remarkable game of football came to symbolise the end of an era both for the author and for the nation's history. On 26th May 1989, the final day of that year's football season, Arsenal travelled to Anfield to face the mighty Liverpool, needing a two-goal victory to claim a championship that seemed for so many reasons to belong to their opponents. What followed was one of the most astonishing football matches at the end of one of the most dramatic and politically chargedseasons in English football history; a season that marked the transition between old and new football and which would come to be seen as a threshold for definitive changes not just in football but in the wider culture. The year of 1989 also marked some profound changes in the life of Jason Cowley, as he began to move away from the warmth and security of a suburban life with his parents and discover music and politics and writing, just some of the passions that would drive his life for the next 20 years. Featuring interviews with the main players in this drama, including many of those who took part in that famous final game such as Steve McMahon, Lee Dixon, Alan Smith and Michael Thomas, and profiles of fans such as Dainton 'the bear' Connell, The Last Game reflects on the stark changes the national sport has undergone in twenty tumultuous years. Journeying from the intense and hostile terraces of the 1980s, where male violence and tribalism coupled with decrepit stadiums and bad policing led to tragedies like Heysel and Hillsborough, to the new commercialism that has engulfed the modern game, where fans have become 'customers' and, some say, security has come at the cost of identity, "The Last Game" tells the story of how a nation was changed by the last game of the last astonishing season of the Eighties. It is also a powerful portrait of England at the end of the Thatcher years; a book about political and social change, about the end of eras, about music, race, family and love.