When violence was the norm: Britain in the 1980s

In middle age you’re supposed to feel nostalgia for your youth, but I finished this book marvelling at how dreadful the 1980s were. The decade hit rock bottom in May 1985 when, within 18 days, 56 football fans died in a fire at Bradford City and 39 in crushes before the Liverpool-Juventus match at the Heysel Stadium. All through, though, the 1980s lived up to one of Roger Domeneghetti’s chapter titles, named for The Barracudas’ song of 1981: ‘We’re living in violent times.’ 

The author, a journalist and academic, has an ambitious premise: sport is the key to understanding what really happened to Britain in the 1980s. The book doesn’t quite live up to that, but it does show how sporting and social dysfunction intertwined. It’s customary, for instance, to think of football hooliganism as a standalone malaise. Domeneghetti puts it in the context of a bloody decade. The pitched battles of the miners’ strike ended just two months before Bradford and Heysel.