Football Poets

A June Welcome ……

Before I welcome the poets new to us this month, a quick note in case you missed it :

Site Outage

Unfortunately we suffered a loss of service on Tuesday 28th June.
Our Host providers are moving offices and servers – the upshot of this will be a more resilient service, however, the downside is that we have lost any poems submitted between Saturday 25th June and Tuesday 28th June.

We have submitted a question to the Host support team to see if we can retrieve those poems.

They will be moving servers around until July 7th. Hopefully there’ll be no more outages or data loss, but I guess there has to be a possibility.

Our Webmaster Dave assures us that he backups our site every month.
To be on the safe side, we recommend that everyone should keep a copy of their own material submitted.

To anyone affected by the data loss, our apologies, but it was beyond our control.

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A warm welcome to all the new poets who joined us in the month of June 2005.
In time honoured chronological order, they are as follows …..

Andy Alcock
Bruce Williams
Casey Milton
Richard Spence
Andy Steenson
Shaun Maddy
Kayleigh & Mark Johnson
Pearl Sutch
Arnold Coleman
Chantal Taylor
Madeeha Ahmed

From the West Ham United Learning Zone, we welcome :

Suhaib Ahmed
Stacey Gardener
Deep Haria
Sundas Malik
Harridaran Muruhathas
Jagraj Grewal
Nicole Chenice Maynard
Jake Wormsley

From the Westminster Cathedral Primary School, in Pimlico, we welcome :

Rachel Fardon
Nadine Charlemagne
Jack Ferrin
Roye Etin uSanga
Michael Costa
James Wittich
Jack Donahue

And we welcome all the pupils from St Mary of the Angels, Bayswater.

Both St Mary’s and Westminster schools participated in a workshop with Crispin Thomas.

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This month, I’d like to reproduce the following selection of new poets :

PS2 Football Hero

Keep your muddy pitches mate
It’s on the screen the place to be
Pixels bring me perfect form
PS2 a virtual reality
No more jumpers down for goalposts
Analogue the strategy
Kids they dont want grass to play on
Sell the fields of dreams today
LMA will teach them lessons
Not the silky skills of bloodied knees
Tackles they’re confined to memory
Concrete turf that’s history.

© Casey Milton

Conspiracy theory

you’ve all heard of that magic bullet?
that one day down in Dallas was shot,
well i think its still ricocheting,
round Hillsborough, as likely as not,
cos misfortune rules large in this valley,
bad luck seems to nag one and all,
and hoping for Wednesday to Rally,
is like hobnailing fog to a wall.
So i reckon it’s all done and dusted,
and fate has its say in the end,
no matter how loud, scream the kops heaving crowd,
on us it will never depend
for the muses of footballing futures,
are weaving their webs as i rhyme
they snigger up sleeves as their wry fingers weave,
losing goals scored in injury time
So i hope against hope in close season,
and i’ll hope as i get on the bus,
that for whatever capricious reason.
we’ll play someone as unlucky as us

© Andy Steenson

Andy : ‘like hobnailing fog to a wall’ : absolutely brilliant!

The REAL Questions of Sport

Think: what are the answers
to the hardest questions that could possibly be ?
Like, would England have won the World Cup
if Banks had passed up that beer for a nice cup of tea ?
And that if only it had been Osgood
And not Astle that was put out there by Ramsey?
Would City have won the title back in ’72
If Marsh had stayed on the bench, and they’d stuck with Summerbee ?
Would it have been sir Colin Bell
If Martin Buchan hadn’t clattered into his knee ?
And how far would George Best have gone
if he’d been chronically incapable of ingesting alcohol ?
Would Gazza be England’s best ever
If he hadn’t been such a silly beggar ?
And Q.P.R. the first London team to lift the European Cup
If, against Norwich at home, they hadn’t slipped up ?
Alas and woe: we can never ever know
the true questions of sport.

© Arnold Coleman

The Boro don’t do dishcloth grey

The Boro play football like the weather
Not ours of course – they don’t do dishcloth grey
But tropical, eleven red and whites that kiss the leather
Like the sun, into evening’s goal, or they go dry
Super Sirocco hot and mean
Together they kiss the sky
Downing’s cross, the feather flick of lightning
In before you saw it
Schwarzer like the moon
A giant tether of tides
Opponent’s clouds come and go
but Mendi’s foot still a Michaelangelo

© Chantal Taylor

I did this a few year’s ago when we had Juninho, Emmerson and Rav and subbed their names for the new boys

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