The Kop
Description
This book examines, for the first time, how and why the Kop became the globally-renowned stand it is today.
It is told through the eyes of Brian Reade, an award-winning journalist, Sunday Times best-selling author and Anfield regular for 60 years, the majority spent on the Kop where he is still a season-ticket holder. In that time he has witnessed, and written about, all the highs and lows of Britain's most successful football club.
Reade traces the Kop's history back to the South African hill it was named after and unearths astonishing parallels between that "acre of massacre" in which Merseyside soldiers were killed and the Hillsborough Disaster almost a century later.
He explores how the Kop invented mass terrace singing in the 1960s, elevated a Broadway number into a global anthem of solidarity, inspired some of European football's greatest-ever comebacks and was at the forefront of supporter protest against exploitation.
Featuring exclusive testimonials from key players, managers and fans from the past 60 years, THE KOP is the definitive celebration of one of the most revered, and feared, spectator stands in world sport.
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Person
Brian Reade is an author and journalist who writes a weekly opinion column for the Daily Mirror.
He was born in Liverpool in 1957, studied English Literature at Warwick University and began his journalism career on the Reading Evening Post in 1981. He became a football writer on the Liverpool Daily Post in 1987 and feature writer/columnist on the Liverpool Echo in 1990 before moving to the Mirror in 1994, where he has worked as a feature writer, columnist (for 29 years) and sports columnist (for 25 years).
The Sports Journalists' Association has voted Reade its Sports Columnist of The Year and The British Press Awards has named him Columnist of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year as well as handing him The Cudlipp Award for Journalistic Excellence following his decades-long fight for justice for the victims of the Hillsborough Disaster.
