Worst Game Ever by Phil Harrison – Review
By Karl Hornsey
We’ve all been there; all football supporters have been there. At the ground, often many miles away from home, wondering if things could possibly get any worse. And then they invariably do. Or watching on TV, helpless and impotent as you watch the agonies unfold, live to the watching world, hoping for the best, but fearing the worst. Only a game? That may be so, but true football fans everywhere have their own story of a match, forever preserved in the mists of time, when they hit rock bottom.
In this excellent offering, Worst Game Ever, Phil Harrison selects 19 club matches, ranging from Champions League finals, European and domestic league football, the FA Cup, and the English non-league, encompassing more than 50 years of heartbreak, misery and despair. It’s not all woe of course, as many of the sides involved on the wrong end of the results have since gone on to bigger and better things, even if that was far from the minds of those in attendance at the time. Harrison is a gifted storyteller, relating the background to these matches and the aftermath but, most importantly of all, finding the human element to them. Because football is nothing without the fans.
“Fall from grace”
While most of the matches involve close encounters that could so easily have gone the other way, the 9-0 humbling of Crystal Palace by Liverpool in 1989 is included, and is an example of something different that Harrison has weaved into this book, with that being one of six chapters ‘guest written’ by people with closer involvement. There are some of European football’s biggest names, including Ajax and Barcelona, with the latter being involved in one of the more bizarre penalty shootout results, losing 2-0 to Steaua Bucharest in the 1986 European Cup final but, with balance in mind, there’s also the likes of Grimsby Town in National League play-off final action.
While there are some stories with light at the end of the tunnel, there are others that are so seismic that the legacy left by one result can last generations, such as Hearts’ spectacular failure to win the Scottish Premier League title in 1986, or Swansea City’s stunning fall from grace, and down the Football League, in the early 1980s. There’s something for everyone in this excellent book and, even if your club hasn’t (yet) been involved in something truly traumatic, it’s worth reading as a salutary lesson to make the most of things while they last – as you’re never too far from becoming a chapter in any future sequel to the Worst Game Ever.
‘Worst Game Ever – Journeys Into the Agonies of Defeat’ by Phil Harrison is published by Pitch
Karl’s love of writing was piqued at the age of eight, when he won a Blue Peter badge in an essay-writing competition. The location of said badge might be a mystery now, but the memory never fades. Hours spent writing about sport as a teenager, in pre-internet years when you had to make your entertainment, honed his skills, and Karl has worked in TV and radio listings at PA Media for 28 years, and the age of hybrid working means 50% of that can be at home listening to Classic FM and thinking about his next visit to his beloved Yorkshire Dales.
@KarlHornsey, hornskar
