The Last Game
by Jason Cowley
FOOD & LEISURE
SIMON & SCHUSTER
06/04/09
The personal touches in Jason Cowley’s football memoir refresh a popular genre, says DJ Taylor
It took Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, and his editing of My Favourite Year, to make the world safe for ‘serious’ writing about football. Jason Cowley’s memoir joins a decent-sized library of books in which Mrs Thatcher, father-son relationships and even the idea of ‘Englishness’ are taken out and examined in the context of adolescent trips to Highbury and Upton Park.
Like Hornby, Cowley concentrates on the epochal encounter between Arsenal and Liverpool on the last day of the 1988/89 season in which Arsenal won the title. His thesis is that the late-1980s aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster brought a welcome change of direction for our national game, marked by an influx of media money and a more benign variety of nationalism, symbolised by the 1990 World Cup. (There is a sub-thesis, too, about the telephone-number-salaried degeneration of the 2000s.)
Not many of Cowley’s conclusions are particularly novel, and he occasionally misreads the historical evidence; there are things here to annoy a serious fan. But what gives The Last Game its edge are the glimpses into a 1970s childhood lived out in the Essex hinterlands with an elusive father – bookishly detached but capable of laying into the linesman at his son’s youth-team games – whose death lies at the book’s unexpectedly poignant core.
DJ Taylor is the author of On the Corinthian Spirit. His latest is novel, Ask Alice
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