Football Poets

Oh woe Derby County
Football fans feel for you
Tonight. Relegation
To the third tier
The truth rammed home
Condemned to the darkest
Room, the lowest of lows
Sobbing skies over Pride Park
Cloughie would be […]

I see no escape, just an imposing fence.
The numbing pain I feel is now so intense.
I feel a surge of pressure, rolling like a wave.
Is this terrace taking me to my grave?

It’s time to close my eyes, I […]

Here we go again
The sack race as
Opposed to youthful
Egg and spoon races
Sean Dyche, now history
For the Burnley bigwigs
At boardroom level
Sighs of discontent
And then dismissed
In the blink of an […]

5 April, 1902
Scotland one
England one
Match unfinished

9 March, 1946
Bolton Wanderers nil
Stoke City nil
Bolton win two nil on aggregate

2 January, 1971
Rangers one
Celtic one

11 May, […]

Hammers in Euro semi final
Can this really be happening
A second instalment of 1976
West Ham, repeating history
Against Teutonic thoroughness
Eintracht Frankfurt, pinch us
Before we awake to the […]

Oh for the gargantuan anti climax of it all
Claret and blue painfully stung by the Bees
Again, Double for West London
Premier League debutants
It felt like deja vu, but please
Refrain from French […]

We’re not very consistent,
We win, we lose, we draw.
The only thing that’s certain is
We’re never true to form.

The other night at Turf Moor,
We somehow lost three-two.
Yet next home game at […]

Half time in Europa League
Battle royale
Quater- Final hanging
By the slenderest cotton thread
For West Ham
The smell of the French revolution
Re-enacted in an East End stockade
Digging in the […]

Now here’s an ode to Everton
Perhaps a word or two of levity
Here’s a phrase of clarity
Yesterday was 1980 all over again
It seemed much longer than years
Of ten
When Lampard senior danced
We were simply […]

John Lennon
He wore a red and white scarf
But did not play much football
And when he raced across Strawberry Fields
He ghosted between the spaces of childhood
Slipped unnoticed behind the gaps
Where nothing […]

So it’s our cousins from across the pond
In World Cup combat
Uncle Sam, New York, New York,
LA, across wide expanses of freeway
Burger joints galore
It’s America in November
For the gentleman […]

there’s no football in Ukraine this weekend
rivalries abandoned for a while
stadiums and streets lie torn and empty
no-one can be seen for mile on mile
women watching husbands go to battle
knowing not if […]

Chernivtsi, Vinnytsia
small towns, small teams
never featured in my dreams
but I feel for them right now
where the rampant fear, is that their touchlines
will be masked by tank tread-lines
spearheading an […]

How to explain the significance of
The International Friendlies
Identifiable as the week
The Premier League relaxed its hold
On our thoughts and perceptions
Last night the Ivory Coast at
The Wembley […]

Notts County v Rochdale,
Meadow Lane, ’96.
Fog draped like a theatre curtain
over the halfway line.

Behind our goal with pie and peas
we watch the action fade away,
hoofed into the unknown,
dribbled into the mist.

We must have thought it was an early April Fool
My and wife and I must have been thinking
Russia, hosts for the Euros 2028
Surely a mistake, a horrible
Lapse in judgment
Far too many shots of vodka
An […]