Moving The Goalposts: A Yorkshire Tragedy

(Paperback)

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'As good an explanation as you will ever read of how the deindustrialisation of the 70s and 80s fuelled Brexit' The Times

'Magnificent . . . A fascinating insight into a decade that changed the nature of sport and changed the face of the country' Rory Smith, Chief Soccer Correspondent, New York Times

Featuring many interviews with sportsmen, managers, miners, musicians, fans and local politicians, this deeply researched and moving investigation casts a new light on an era that read the last rites for the country's collective culture.

Reviews

If you want to know how it feels to be left behind, if you want to know how it feels to be forgotten, if you want to know how it feels to be heartbroken, then read this book.

A tender and often terrifying tour of some of Yorkshire's - and England's - most cherished sporting institutions and the communities that surround and succour them, and how their experience reflects the nation's swaying fortunes since the start of the 1980s, A Yorkshire Tragedy is compelling, illuminating, very human and often quite moving. - Guardian

A well-researched, lovingly-written, thoughtful journey across the sporting highs and struggles of a great English region - placed in the context of its social fabric, qualities, conflicts and historic disasters: Anthony Clavane's book illuminates, and delivers important home truths throughout.

Again the echoes of Brexit are clear. Commentators and strategists just weren't listening to the right conversations. Or reading the right things. J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy eloquently tells the story of the "left behind" in the Appallachians and the social and economic costs of change that fuelled the rage underpinning Trump. The British equivalent is the brilliant A Yorkshire Tragedy by Anthony Clavane, which is as good an explanation as you will ever read of how the deindustrialisation of the 70s and 80s fuelled Brexit. - The Times

A Yorkshire Tragedy combines social and sporting history with total relevance to the present day. A fine record of the sad decline of God's own country.

The language sparkles, the insights flash . . . The rise and fall of Yorkshire sporting giants is a marvellous prism for the social and economic change in the region . . . Essential. - Prospect

Authoritative, passionate and evocative this deeply researched work is about more than Yorkshire, more than sport. It is about society and needs to be read in Westminster as much as Leeds, Bradford or Sheffield.

Author Bio

Anthony Clavane was born in Leeds in 1960 and is a Sunday Mirror sports writer. He has won Press Gazette Feature Writer of the Year and BT Regional Sportswriter of the Year awards. His first book Promised Land: A Northern Love Storywas named both Football Book of the Year and Sports Book of the Year by the National Sporting Club, Sports Book of the Year by The Radio 2 Book Club, and won the award for Football Book of the Year at the 2011 British Sports Book Awards. His second book, Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here: The Story of English Football's Forgotten Tribe was shortlisted for the 2013 British Sports Awards Football Book of the Year and inspired the Four Four Jew exhibition at the Jewish Museum in London.