Football Poets

The chapter and verse who beguiled and dazzled
With the smooth seduction of a million, million hearts
Beating to the rhythm of the beautiful soul
Whilst defences fell like discarded notes
From a trembling […]

“Masks and gloves !”
Roars Neville Southall
“When I wore them,
“I caught #%€$ (sod) all!”

number7
© emdad rahman

Are you hangin’ up your trophies on the wall?
Are you watchin’ Salah mesmerise the ball?
The boot room days are over
And things not quite the same
But 3 European Cups still bear your name
What secrets did you […]

You can easly say
Lennon and Ball
You can easly say
1960’s

But now,
The pop star and
the football star
are not so prominent

Or they are living
in the new era

The Covid era

There were Alan […]

Football is as much geography as physiology
the pitch the very landscape of conjecture
its borders collect around the ground
tendered, watered, and cultivated
cajoled into imagined emerald grass
for molten […]

Liverpool 2-1 Sheffield United

Fabinho took the centre back slot
Conceding an early penalty
Sander Berge after a VAR review
Foul on Oliver McBurnie

It’s all square by Firmino
A few minutes before t […]

The Beautiful Game is a wonderful life
Gives us moments of joy wrapped in parcels of strife
The goals and the saves and the less and the more
The crosses and losses the wins and the draws
The badly behaved […]

200 souls in the pouring rain
Week in week out all here the same
Not for glory or the glimmer of fame
Grassroots for me not gravy train

Print match programme the odd refrain
22 footballers taking the […]

Shankly making the people happy
Mooro pristine in his tackles and kit
Banks of England with his safe pair of hands
Chippy Brady darting over the pitch
Adams as stoical as the house made of bricks
Football to […]

In the boots of a striker
The bliss of a kiss
The quiet of a heron
Pursuing a fish

Upstream and sparkling
Where the wild salmon dart
But most of all

Through the aching capillaries
Of my lost childhood’s heart.

Everton 2-2 Liverpool

Mane put the Reds ahead
Keane rises to answer the call
Rodriguez conducts the Blues
Thiago at the heart of it all

Ban Dijk out, Salah volleys in
Yerry Mina far from […]

You didn’t play football
On the grass of Strawberry Fields
You didn’t wear a red or blue scarf
You didn’t strain yer neck trying to watch
The game from the Kop at Anfield or
The street end at them there Blues […]

The toes of a dancer
The swish of a kiss
The splash of red ketchup
On lush fish and chips

Upstream and sparkling
Where the wild salmon dart
But most of all

Liverpool Football Club
The place in my heart.

Mi Scuse but I’m potty
For the charm of Ancelotti
Tho his chosen club of blue
Is not my mighty bold red hue.

Who are at the top of the table
Everton
You may say that I am a dreamer
Then,
Nothing to do with Everton
somehow
The both
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
ARE gifted writers
WHOSE names have one “TO”
there is […]

Aston Villa 7-2 Liverpool

Ollie Watkins in the first-half
Perfect hat-trick tops the polls
Jack Grealish having a hand
In five of the Villa goals

McGinn back in the act
Salah with a brace
Villa […]

No prima donna’s neon boots
No glitzy goalie aches to shoot
A sloping pitch a non-league dog
A Poem A Pie and A Pint of grog

Dogged defenders who stay the course
Strikers with the pace of Inspector M […]

Liverpool 2-1 Arsenal

In the week of a double header
One team will pay the price
Today it’s the Gunners
Who’ll be visiting Anfield twice

When Robbo commits an error
One so very rare
It’s one nil t […]

back for one day
to the ground on the hill
careful and wary
with Covid here still
temp’rature testing
out here on the street
we stand in a line
in our masks in the heat

we’re grateful to be here
this […]