Pitch Publishing, £18.99
Reviewed by Huw Richards
From WSC 426, November/December 2022
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Stories
With talk of the club being up for sale, the heady days of Jack Walker's reign at Blackburn Rovers seem so long ago, Bruce Wilkinson writes
Reports in the Daily Mirror that the owners of Blackburn Rovers could be willing to listen to offers for the club have come as a shock to the team’s supporters, under the impression that the Jack Walker Trust, set up on his deathbed, would run the club in perpetuity.
Dave Hill's book Out Of His Skin analysed the racial tension surrounding the arrival of John Barnes at Liverpool in 1987. In an extract from the introduction to a new edition, Dave Hill reflects on the reaction to his book
Ever since the watershed of the Taylor Report, an anti-racist climate has undoubtedly been fostered in British football. Vocal racist elements within football grounds find it harder to proceed as if they have a divine right to define and dominate the mood, to chant, threaten and generally get away with things that would not be tolerated in any other public place. A wide-ranging campaign has been mobilised against racism in a way that would have been impossible as recently as the mid-Eighties. Such is the optimistic reading of the story of racism in English football since Out Of His Skin was written. It has substance and deserves applause. But any suggestion that racism has ceased to have a disfiguring impact on our football would be dangerously naive.