Football Poets

“Perhaps we are all wrong,
and Southgate
is a substitution genius.”

The Facebook banter
after the England game
moves into the realm
of long-ago memory
as we talk of previous
footballing magic […]

Thunderous shooting that transcended his era.
Maybe you have to be a certain age.
When they announced it during the game
the crowd of six hundred
barely reacted. No gasps or murmurs.
My son shrugged, […]

Uh-oh. The world’s gone pear-shaped.
I have a feeling that I’m close to home,
or at least the train. Too old for this
malarkey. Was doing so well. Now
I’m all over the place, lost count,
head swimming. This […]

One hundred thousand,
at least, for a friendly.
The Russians were
still our friends, weren’t they?
November 1945.
So many servicemen
back from the war

hungry to watch football again.
A photo s […]

A lone bugler occasionally
blasts out the right note.
Maybe also the source
of the odd native American
war cry. The few hundred at Ashington
are passionate in their support.

Proud mining town, home
of […]

Jack, always the town planner,
is interested in the wind turbine
that can be seen from the ground
as well as the old terrace houses,
and fatalistic about the enormous
estate pub boarded up
for more than a […]

Greyhound track that separated
us from our idols. Banging
the corrugated back of the Shed.
Boys’ turnstile. Rosettes, rattles,
hot dog sellers, trains that rumbled
behind the North Stand.

One of the b […]

Ancient Chinese proverb:
one football fan’s
never-to-be-forgotten
victory is another’s
hardest-to-swallow defeat.

Always a lovely song
that plucked at the heartstrings.
But over the years it took on
a melancholy, mournful note.
So many disappointments,
hands of God, penalty shoot-outs,
racist abuse on social […]

Remember Brian Glover in Kes? The teacher
imagining he’s Bobby Charlton, United v Spurs?
This bloke was something similar.

Me and my brother were drinking
at the Spanish campsite pool bar. He told u […]

Parade of the pony-tails.
No wrestling in the box;
getting up and getting on with it.
Football as it should be played.

Showing the men how to entertain,
putting them to shame.
The spirit of sport. […]

Never really knew my mother’s father.
All I remember: tuft of nostril hair,
spied from sitting on his knee; hoard
of half-hidden threepenny pieces
slipped into a sandpit outside the lido.

In pictures he l […]

‘Some people think that football
is a matter of life and death …’

I was a Chelsea supporter
for 40 years before
the Roman empire.

Fan is short for fanatic.
Empires fall. Football’s
nowhere near
as […]

The early April afternoon was glorious.

The daffs were out, I felt Wordsworthian.

You’d come down from York to look

at houses. We caroused that evening

with old friends in the Railway Tavern – […]