READING: Cowley, The Last Game

Jason Cowley
The Last Game
2009

The Last Game, ostensibly an extended essay about the Liverpool v Arsenal title decider in 1989, is about much more than football. It is part biography, part social commentary, part fanzine and a wholly passionate read. It’s about Cowley’s relationship with football, with his father, with journalism and with the world around him, often all four at once. The prologue provides an interesting insight into his psychology:

“I accepted the false dichotomy between the so called highbrow and lowbrow and had concluded that you couldn’t be both a book man and sports man – that the two cultures were separate, with no connecting bridge between them.”

As a bookish journalist living in Edinburgh, 60 miles from my derelict hometown of Linwood where ignorance is practically a virtue, and 60 miles from my football team St Mirren which I still visit most weeks largely to catch up with my brother and boyhood friends, I know all about this dichotomy and can identify with the polar forces pulling him apart.

But Cowley and I both know that this dichotomy is, indeed, false (many people still recoil in shock when I inform them novelist Christopher Brookmyre is also a St Mirren fan). Cowley approaches his sport like the giants of American literature approached their sports. He marries his bookish head with his sporting heart and does for football what Norman Mailer did for boxing, Ernest Hemingway did for bullfighting, and Hunter S Thomson did for desert racing - he chronicles the attitudes, troubles and prejudices of the day through the prism of a single sporting event.

He even measures his own theories on that other momentous sporting event of 1989, the Hillsborough disaster, not against those of contemporary British writers such as the divisive Kelvin MacKenzie but against another giant of modern American literature Don Dellilo, who described the fans’ suffering like a great religious painting, “a crowded twisted vision of a rush to death as only a master of the age could paint it”.

And he writes about Arsenal v Liverpool the way Mailer wrote about Ali v Foreman, as a titanic battle between gladiators rather than a lowbrow working class sport. He elevates Arsenal manager George Graham, a tough Scot born eight miles in the opposite direction of Glasgow as myself, to the status of an ageing warrior-poet:

“[As a player] Graham was a languid presence in midfield. He passed and moved so gracefully that he was known variously as the Stroller, the Ringmaster and The Peacock. ‘I had a quick brain but a slow body,’ he has said. ‘I needed time, which is not available in the English game today.’...

“[As a manager] Graham did not like strollers or peacocks: the footballer as the egoist or exhibitionist. He preferred grafters...Graham demanded toil and labour from his players and coaching staff.”

Even when he moves away from the football field to review the social change of the 80s he does so from the terraces, chronicling the changing attitudes to race through the eyes of John Barnes dodging bananas, likens a rave during 1988’s second summer of love to “an especially intense football match”, and conflates his Last Game thesis – that the ’89 title decider marked the transition between old and new football – with the other great social upheavals of the late 80s such as the decline of communism and Fukuyama’s theories on “the end of history”.

Running through it all is his own struggle to maintain his relationship with football and with his ailing father, his efforts to kindle his relationships with his wife and with journalism and the journey he took towards becoming the current editor of New Statesman and, as author of The Last Game, the thinking fans wordsmith.