ANDY POLLAKreviews The Last Game: Love, Death and FootballBy Jason Cowley Simon and Schuster 276pp, £14.99
WE CAN blame Nick Hornby's Fever Pitchfor starting the trend of young, well-educated, middle-class Englishmen writing "coming of age" accounts based around their experiences as football fans. Jason Cowley's is the latest of what has almost become a genre: it involves the same club as Hornby's (Arsenal), the same time (up to the end of the 1980s), although with different politics (more left-wing).
Cowley is also an example of a new kind of commentator: the sports writer who has graduated to intellectual journalism – from soccer to society – in his case from the Observer Sport Monthlyto the editorship of the New Statesman.
This is a slight if readable tale. The book centres around Cowley’s recollections of the final game of the season on May 26th, 1989, when Arsenal, needing to beat Liverpool by two goals in their home fortress of Anfield to win the then First Division championship, did that in a dramatic way, with the winning goal coming in the 91st minute with a shot over the goalkeeper from midfielder Michael Thomas.
However, this is not a book just about football. Cowley believes that the 1988-1989 season, particularly the tragedy at the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield six weeks earlier, in which 96 people were crushed to death at an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, marked a turning point both for English football and English society. Before that season, the birthplace of the “beautiful game” was experiencing declining crowds, hooliganism and disasters like Heysel and Hillsborough, while Margaret Thatcher was destroying the power of the unions and dismantling the welfare state.
Ahead were the astonishing plutocracy of the Premiership, wall-to-wall televised soccer courtesy of Rupert Murdoch and Sky, and the more benign era of New Labour. Cowley touches on all these sporting and social changes. As one would expect from a sports writer, he is good on the present day malaise of the game: what he calls “the greatest, gaudiest spending spree” in the history of English football.
He is less impressive on what the upheaval of recent decades in English soccer reflects in wider society. That has to be a subject of a denser study than this memoir.
The memoir has a third strand. Woven into the text is an account of the author’s relationship with his West Ham-supporting father, a private man from an East End background who never quite made it in the fashion business. The tensions between a working-class father and an upwardly mobile son are captured in an exchange about what they are reading, when Cowley remarks superciliously: “Come on, Dad, everyone’s read Wittgenstein, don’t you think?”
For Irish readers, this book is also a timely reminder that Jack Charlton didn’t invent the “long ball” game, which proved so successful for his Irish teams in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Its real master was Arsenal manager George Graham, whose exhortation to his players to “pressure, pressure, pressure” was what ultimately won them the 1989 championship.
Andy Pollak is director of the Centre for Cross-Border Studies