Product Description

On 26 May 1989, the final day of the 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 remarkable football matches at the end of one of the most dramatic and politically charged seasons 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 astonishing changes not just in football but in the wider culture. Featuring interviews with the main players in this drama, including many of the legendary figures who took part in that famous final game, The Last Game is a probing and resonant work of dramatic reportage that 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 led to tragedies like Heysel and Hillsborough, to the new commercialism that has engulfed the modern game, where fans have turned 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 one astonishing game.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24262 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Review
'Compelling . . . The book has so much more than just football' --Sunday Telegraph

Review
'Football has not lost its soul if it can inspire a book as lucid, moving and emotionally literate as this'

Review
'Lovingly crafted and well executed . . . indisputably a good writer'

Customer Reviews

Football's coming home
The Last Game is an extraordinary and brilliant book. I picked it up wondering whether we weren't just going to revisit Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch". Instead we get a cocktail of high sporting drama, social commentary and a personal biography, binding everything together through the author's reflections on his father. It was the tragic death in the early 1990s that triggered Jason Cowley's own quest to understand an era, as he saw it, the spanned post-war Britain through the nineteen eighties drawing to a recognisable end as the nineties kicked off. Cowley, an Arsenal fan, was enthralled by the famous game, the last match of 1989 when Arsenal needed to pull off an unlikely two-nil victory away at Liverpool to steal the title from their northern rivals. Astonishingly they did it. With more or less the last kick of the game, the last kick of the season, the last kick of the decade which preceded the advent of "global football" Michael Thomas won the title for Arsenal.

The true tension of great sport is almost impossible to capture in prose. Occasionally it happens. A couple of years ago I read Matt Rendell's outstanding biography of the Italian cyclist Marco Pantani. The depiction, in Rendell's book, of Pantani's legendary stage win, passing over les deux Alpes in the 1998 tour de France was as exhilarating as watching the event. Cowley too, in describing how Michael Thomas was "lost to the moment" as he homed in to score that amazing goal has managed to capture the tension and excitement of that extraordinary moment.

A simple narrative account of that match would not make a great book. Cowley, however, a leading journalist and social commentator, now editing the New Statesman, offers a broader thesis. That match, the last game, heralded the end of an era in football. The game where supporters followed local teams became global. The tragedy at Hillsborough, the watershed event that transformed England's football terraces, preceded the "last game" by just a few weeks. That ended-era was also marked, shortly afterwards, by the death of Cowley's father, Tony. Britain too, transformed by the Thatcher years, lost much of its own character as the global village became ever more entwined.

Cowley was raised in Harlow, Essex, one of the new towns built after the second world war to house the massive population overspill from the blitzed capital. The town was, as Cowley reflects from his childhood, a kind of Utopia. Idealistic planning and organised infrastructures functioned to encourage the building of a society. Local football leagues, places for children to play. An active theatre. It was clearly a great place to grow up in; its green fields so different from the East End squalor of the war years. However, the fortunes of towns like Harlow began to change in the eighties. The anti-society messages of Thatcherism destroying those values. Cowley's father turned increasingly to idealised reflections on his own East End childhood during the Blitz at this time. Maybe it is time, the carefree existence of childhood, and not place, then, that shapes our thoughts.

The extraordinary thing is that the three parallel paths to the book hold together so well. Each part echoes the other, giving a deeply insightful account of how the Nation's game affected and was affected by the changing world - and how those changes, in their turn, affect us all.

A book for all seasons
Jason Cowley's book is a compelling read for many reasons, not least of all the human and very moving relationship between himself and his father, but the insight we get into how football can not only define a moment in time, but also how the game became almost bigger than life itself. Like all great football clubs, Arsenal are measured by great cross-generational games that have became legendary, such as the 1930 FA Cup Final against Huddersfield Town or the 1970 Fairs Cup win over Anderlecht; let alone mentioning the saga of the 1971 double triumph or the 1953 championship win over Burnley at Highbury on the last day of the season. The game that permeates this book is probably the most famous of all, not only because of the tragedy of Hillsborough, but the fact that it changed our relationship with the professional game forever. As the author has mentioned so well in the book, it has now become a part of the entertainment industry, a television game with multi-million pound investment thrust upon it, with so many of our clubs being taken over by foreign businessmen from all across the world; but it wasn't always like that, and having read this book, it does make the reader question if we have indeed lost more than we have gained in the long run. Also the book serves as a social history of our times as well; like Jason, I too grew up in Harlow, and like so many others of my generation, feel sad at its post-Thatcher decline, when once upon a time it was a vibrant young town in which Londoners flocked to in droves to start a new life with a promise of a job and a house; a future which is sadly no longer available in the 21st century world. I believe this book will find its place on many football fans' bookshelves, as I believe that in the years to come, because of the clubs' attitude to the grass roots fans, it will not be able to be written again, maybe at a lower league level perhaps, but certainly not in the English professional game at the highest level. An excellent read by a natural and gifted author.

More than a football book
Jason Cowley has written a book about the last football season of the 1980s, a season when things were so different in football and when things were so different in Britain. He brings that time that now seems so long ago to life on the page, the way things were then: in football in society and in politics. It's also a very touching and sad personal story about Cowley's relationship with his father (who died suddenly when Cowley was a young man) and this personal angle mixes with the bigger themes to make a compelling and very readable book.

It's moving and interesting both as a memoir and as a portrait of a time gone by, that many of us will remember for things good and bad (1989 was the year of Hillsborough). Hugely enjoyable.