The Last Game by Jason Cowley
Nineteen Eighty-Nine: walls are coming down, dictators are being ousted and fans are being crushed to death at football matches. Jason Cowley is in the last year at university, suspended between the certainties of his old life and the excitement of an unknown future. For his father, the future no longer exists; he has begun to live his life as if in reverse, and he has many secrets.
They meet occasionally at his instigation to watch football together, the first time they have done so for more than a decade. He’s trying to reconnect – but why? What is it that he wants to say but can’t? And why does he think he can say it through football?
Meanwhile, the national game is being convulsed in ways no one could have predicted. Everything seems to be changing, nothing is making sense, and summer is here, the summer of the rave and of ecstasy. Very soon nothing will ever be the same again.
By revisiting one remarkable football match at the end of the most dramatic and politically charged season in English football history, a season that marked the transition between old and new football, between the game as it was then and what it became, Jason Cowley takes us deep into the national game, and by proxy, the national psyche, as he tries to discover just why football is so important to us all.
