Book description
When the Leeds United players celebrated winning the championship in
April 1992, they could not have had an inkling of how momentous the
occasion was. Manchester United, losers at Liverpool that sunny Sunday
afternoon, had now gone 25 years without winning the league. Howard
Wilkinson's side, promoted just two seasons ago, could bring back the
glory days to Leeds. But Wilkinson would prove to be the last English
manager to win the league. In 1992, football changed beyond all recognition.
Twenty years on, The Last Champions looks back at the roots
of that success and the amazing cast of characters who came together
to fashion the triumph. As in his acclaimed book The Fallen,
Dave Simpson's quest to catch up with the protagonists of the era,
from the visionary Sergeant Wilko, top scorer Lee Chapman and unsung
heroes like Mike Whitlow and Carl Shutt (not forgetting Eric Cantona,
of course), sees him unearth some extraordinary untold stories.
And he finds that The Last Champions were also the last ordinary
people to win the league, before the Premier League saw skyrocketing
wages, billionaire foreign owners and the dictates of television
taking the game away from the fans. It is the brilliantly told story
of the end of an era.
Dave Simpson is a Guardian journalist who writes mainly on
music. His first book, The Fallen, was a monumental quest to
track down everyone who had ever played in Mark E Smith's legendary
band. He is now applying those same forensic and possibly certifiable
skills to his football team, Leeds United.
Living in Yorkshire, he has supported Leeds since the early 1970s,
man and boy, which has brought about a small amount of pleasure and a
great amount of pain. He also wrote for the LeedsLeedsLeeds
magazine which documented United's rise and mostly fall from 1998
to 2011.
