Books On Football - The Last of England - 'The Last Game - Love, Football & Death' by Jason Cowley

Sean O'Conor

That the profit obsession of the Premier League has polluted football's tradition and tarnished its values is a widely-held belief.

The ongoing betrayal of the sport's traditional values, given greater interrogation as part of the global economic downturn, forms the backdrop to Jason Cowley's intriguing book 'The Last Game', the most talked-about soccer book this year.

In the foreground is the climactic final game of the 1988-'89 season when Arsenal stole the title from Liverpool in the most dramatic fashion imaginable.

Cowley, an Arsenal fan revisiting his club's finest hour, pinpoints that season's showdown as a crossroads between two worlds - the end of clubs' affinity to their localities and the end of their ill-treatment of those same fans, and the start of a new money-obsessed sport severing ties with its origins at every opportunity, loosening the bonds of history in search of a fast buck.

The result of that final clash seems immaterial twenty years on. At the time Michael Thomas' improbable strike left you either stunned or elated depending on your club allegiance. A championship for the club which had just suffered so much would have been the act of a loving God; instead it was yanked away cruelly. But I remember leaping for joy because of the sheer wonder of it all; in the same way I almost did cartwheels when Manchester United snatched the 1999 Champions League final from the jaws of defeat. A last-minute winner remains one of the gems of the football experience. When it is also the last kick of a season and means you take the title on goals scored, it takes on Herculean proportions.

We know now that when the final whistle blew at Anfield an era had ended and a new one had begun. The removal of the fences following Hillsborough was the first step in making stadia welcoming places and diluting the atmosphere of menace which still plagues Italian football today. I have pondered the dark thought many times that Italy needs its own Hillsborough to sort its ultras out, and that the odd fan or policeman killed here and there will not be enough to enact the type of wholesale transformation England has benefited from.

Like an alcoholic, English football did need to hit rock bottom before it could rise again. The future for fans just could not be worse than that April afternoon at Leppings Lane.

He cites the end of the 1980s as an epoch of change in general as the Eastern Block disintegrated and the Iron Lady began to rust, posing an intriguing question about the pre-destination of football history, but not answering it.

For sure, no-one could have foreseen the tragedy in Sheffield that April morning as Liverpool fans headed out to watch their team take on Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup semi-final, less so the monumental changes to the English game that it kick-started. One point he does miss is that the Forest fans received more tickets than Liverpool's because the police wanted them to arrive at their respective stands without crossing paths in the city beforehand.

Cowley does not ponder what would have happened without the deaths at Hillsborough, but paints an accurate picture of English football in the '80s all the same, rightly stating how much more enjoyable, and affordable it was to be a fan then than it is now.

Supporters were none the wiser about stadia which were abysmal by today's standards of spectator comfort, and they were comfortable with experiencing on a weekly basis the type of policing which caused a furor at the recent G20 protests in London. I know, because I was one of those fans escorted to and from the train station and locked inside the ground for an hour after final whistle every week.

But the '80s did feel like drudgery for the domestic game, as it plodded along from one crisis to another, with the 'English disease' of hooliganism an ever-present albatross until Hillsborough came along to slay that dragon.

Cowley only touches briefly on the immense camaraderie felt by all football fans in the Hillsborough aftermath, for whom lamping each other was not on the agenda anymore. But he does rightly label it an armistice, when for a while it seemed English football itself had shuddered to a halt and the season would never be concluded.

Since his purpose was to cite 90 minutes as the demarcation between old and new rather than the cause of the cultural shift, he thankfully does not dwell on the hour and a half in question for too many pages. The play itself was not the point.

The book's subtitle is 'Love, Death and Football' and much of the narrative is autobiographical, as the young man grows up while his elders grow old, football fans all, allowing him to dip into themes of masculinity and family identity. These passages supply the glue for the rest of the book, although Cowley's introduction to Liverpool the city almost slips into parody as he attends an Echo & the Bunnymen concert in the decaying St George's Hall and snogs a girl who takes him back to her flat to tell him about unemployment and the dockers.

Without the emotional and personal element, all football recollections atrophy into dry statistics however, and Cowley's is the latest in a literary tradition which began three years after the Last Game when another Arsenal fan picked up his pen and wrote 'Fever Pitch'.

His period research on the two clubs is interesting, especially as it corroborates the theory that Hillsborough broke the spell of the invincible Liverpool and shows how ragtag an outfit the champions Arsenal were compared to Wenger's crew today - Tuesday night meant alcoholic oblivion for many of George Graham's men, two of whom, Tony Adams and Paul Merson, became self-confessed addicts. I was also interested to read that Gerard Houllier ascribed the Reds' passing game to the communal make-up of Liverpool's people, with everyone helping each other out.

If I have a quibble with the book it is in Cowley's closing gambit that complaining about 'new football' is futile nostalgia, a slightly odd conclusion after he correctly lists all the things that are amiss with the game in 2009. For evil to triumph it is surely only necessary for good men to do nothing. And Cowley is clearly a good man, whose warmth shines through the pages and who also happens to be editor of the left-leaning New Statesman.

'The Last Game' may seem to have been English football's kairotic moment - the appointed time in the purpose of God, but then the divine is a matter of faith, not incontestable fact.

Sky's 'Whole New Ball Game' motto and 'Year Zero' statistics have still to convince many of us, and the pricing-out of young fans will surely rebound at some stage.

Reading this fine book, memories of my formative football years in the '80s came flooding back, and with them a terse phrase which rounded off an editorial in a Playfair Annual towards the end of that below-par decade, words which oddly resonate today, despite soccer's new age:

"As usual," it concluded following yet another depressing year of the post-Heysel ban and clubs' financial woes, "football does not know where it is going."

Sean O'Conor

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