Jason Cowley

The Last Game: Love, Death and Love

Associated Newspapers (edited extract)

For most sports fans of a certain age, Saturday 15 April, 1989 is the day that English football changed forever. At a distance of 20 years one can speak now of the game of football in England as it was before and after the traumatic events of that afternoon, in the same way as one can speak of cinema before and after the advent of sound; as the transition between two epochs, as a moment of profound and irreversible cultural shift. The explanation for this can be reduced to one word: Hillsborough.

For it was on that afternoon at the Hillsborough stadium in Sheffield, during an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, that 96 people were crushed to death on the Leppings Lane terrace. The crush followed an order by the police to open an exit gate outside the main entrance to the Leppings Lane terrace and the consequent surge of many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of fans into the stadium, some with tickets, some without. The fans surged straight into the tunnel that passed beneath the West Stand and into the two densely populated central pens. The Liverpool supporters who were already in those central pens were, in effect, caged, like cattle being transported for slaughter.

High security fences prevented people from escaping on to the pitch (the match had already started) or sideways across the terrace into the less-congested side pens. The resulting crush was immediate and unendurable – and it was being watched live on television around the world. Many people, including children, died on their feet that day, the very breath of life squeezed out of them.

I was at a football match myself that afternoon, 150 miles away in London and standing on the North Bank terrace at Arsenal’s Highbury stadium. I have never forgotten the shocked silence that settled suddenly on the crowd of 38,000 when it was announced over the public-address system that the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough had been abandoned and that people had died. I was with friends and we automatically assumed the deaths had been caused by hooliganism of the kind that had blighted English football for too long. It wasn’t until the next morning that we discovered that the catastrophe of Hillsborough had been caused not by hooliganism but by police error and atrocious crowd control.

The morning after Hillsborough, I felt the need to speak to my father, who had introduced me to football many years before and had recently inspired my reconnection with the game. He was away in Hong Kong on business but, when we finally spoke on an indistinct telephone line, he told me of how he had watched the tragedy of Hillsborough unfolding on television at a friend’s house in Kowloon. He was horrified by what he had witnessed and never before had I heard such desolation in his voice.

"How can the season continue after this?" I asked him.

"It can’t," he said. "It’s over. What happened at Hillsborough could have happened to any of us, at any time. The whole infrastructure of the game is corrupt."

Then he said: "I’m finished with football."

At that time, in the spring of 1989, I was in my final year at the University of Southampton and my father was working in the clothing business, in the rag trade as he called it. I was living away from home and he was often abroad travelling in India and the Far East. We were seeing very little of each other, and our relationship was changing from one of dependence to one of greater equality. What held us together, what kept us talking, was football. Indeed, we were planning to go to see a game together on Sunday 23 April: Liverpool versus Arsenal at Anfield.

But then, in the immediate aftermath of Hillsborough, the season was suspended for two weeks to allow for a period of mourning and for the authorities to prepare their appalled response. The game my father and I had planned to watch together was eventually rescheduled for 26th May. In the event, it would turn out to be the very last game of the 1988-89 season and provide the most astonishingly dramatic climax to an English season that there has ever been or is ever likely to be. Against the backdrop of Hillsborough and with the city of Liverpool in profound mourning, Arsenal went into that last game three points behind Liverpool, the defending champions, and with an inferior goal difference, having been top of the table for most of the second half of the season and overhauled by a resurgent Liverpool only at the last. To be champions for the first time since 1971 Arsenal had to win at Anfield by two goals against a team that had dominated English and European football for more than a decade. Arsenal won 2-0, their second goal being scored in injury time, with virtually the last kick of the last full season of the Eighties.

Even more astonishing than Arsenal’s last-gasp winner that night was the Liverpool fans’ response to defeat. Rather than leaving the stadium in anger and disappointment, they stayed on in their tens of thousands to applaud and to witness the presentation of the championship trophy to the team from London. They did not jeer, boo or sulk. They stayed on and simply applauded. Here was a demonstration of the real meaning of sporting glory.

In retrospect, that night Anfield marked the end of the old football and the beginnings of the new gaudy game we have today. This is because 1989 was also the year in which Sky Television (renamed BSkyB in 1990) launched its British service via Astra satellite. Buying exclusive broadcasting rights to sports events such as the new Premier League when it was established in 1992 was the means by which Sky would grow its subscription base in the United Kingdom. And it was the drama and emotion of Arsenal’s title win at Anfield, as well as the reforms which followed the publication of the Taylor report into the Hillsborough disaster, such as the introduction of all-seater stadiums, that convinced TV executives football had the potential to reach a new mass audience; that rather than being marginalised as a game for the poor and working class it could in fact become an engine of cash-generation.

I missed out on seeing Arsenal win the title at Anfield, because my father had been characteristically true to his word: the season did indeed finish for him on 15 April 1989, and on that day or thereabouts, thinking that I shared his sense of hopelessness and desolation, he’d thrown away our tickets for Anfield as if they were mere sweet wrappers.

My father died suddenly in January 1991, and sometimes I wonder what he would have made of the way English football has changed since 1989. The moneyed homogeneity that has overtaken the game at the highest level – the rapacity, the greed, the disconnectedness between players and fans, the outrageous ticket prices, the ridiculous, swaggering behaviour of some of the players, the astronomical wages – would astonish and dismay my father.

Nowadays, whole groups of people – teenage boys, pensioners – have been priced out from going to games. There exists a terrible separation between those who are paid to play the game and those who watch or write about it. "The whole game is ridiculous now," says John Holmes, who was one of Britain’s first sports agents and is a former chairman and chief executive of the European division of SFX Entertainments. "The culture of the young footballer today is so aggressively acquisitive. The peer culture is so dominant. We had a player I looked after who had five cars on lease but he didn’t know where three of them were; they’d gone in gambling debts… There’s no moral justification for what they earn. What they earn has an effect on people; it creates a culture and a climate. How do they use their money? Are they doing good with it? Is it developing them as people? I’m not sure it is."

How different it once was. I first began going to watch football with my father in the mid-Seventies. He was born in West Ham, in the East End, but as a restlessly ambitious young man he moved out of London to live in Essex, where he and my mother bought themselves a house on a quiet cul-de-sac and set about raising a family. "Once you’re out of here," my father’s mother used to say to her son of the old East End, "you’ll never come back, because you’ll never want to come back."

But my father did go back, often, to watch West Ham, the team he’d grown up supporting. My father was a reticent man, quietly spoken, charming and thoughtful. But when he was at football he seemed to be someone completely different as he locked shoulders with those around him, all swaying as they sang "We’re Forever blowing Bubbles". How at ease he seemed as he lost himself in the collectivity of song and chant and synchronised movement.

For my father, supporting West Ham was a statement of local identity and belonging: for him the love of football was an expression of the love of place. He believed in the moral character-building potential of sport, in ethical codes of conduct and fair play. He especially admired Bobby Moore, former captain of West Ham and England. To my father, Moore was a symbol of a certain kind of English innocence, the ball-player of unusual dignity and grace. He once told me that something disappeared from football about the time Bobby Moore retired in the mid-1970s. What exactly? I asked him. My father couldn’t really explain. All he said was that this loss had something to do with what he described as "our once having had a common culture" – by which he meant, I presume, a greater sense of national purpose and togetherness.

But where did Bobby Moore, our World Cup-winning captain, fit into all this? Maybe my father meant something more than that. Whatever he had meant, it sounded like old-style romantic nostalgia to me – all those guys with cloth caps standing together on the terraces – and I said as much to him, with my haughty young’s man’s indifference.

Nowadays, I think I know what my father meant. Football, like so much else in our culture, has become debased, coarsened by vacuous consumption, celebrity-worship, an absence of social restraint, and greed. There has been a profound loss of national identity and of togetherness. Many of our leading clubs – with their foreign billionaire owners and squads of mostly foreign players – are English only in the sense that they happen to be based in England. There was of course much that was wrong with the old football, as the Hillsborough tragedy showed. But while reform was necessary and the game had to change, the story didn’t have to end like this.

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