Football Poets

I heard on the radio today
That the entire Melksham Under 12 Football Team
Has the same first name;
They are called Christopher.
What are the implications of this?
Is it confusing if the referee takes someone’s n […]

In the race
For success
In football,
Remember
That there is
Only one race,
But the prize is
Cosmopolitan.

Prior Prior,
A Priori,
Post Prior,
A Posteriori,
But Prior Prior
There is no Prior,
Q.E.D. dee dee dee.

The pub door sign said “Bored People are Boring” –
An arresting image of bored people snoring
In exponential ennui,
“You were boring first.” “No, I wasn’t.” “O.K. Then it was me.
But you were boring second, so you […]

What Now?
What now, now that the ball is over?
What now, now that the season is a fading memory,
A mildewed basket of last year’s harvest-hopes?
What now at 3 o’ clock on these long Saturday afternoons –
Motor rac […]

Football is a Grassroots Game –
We all know what this means don’t we?
It means that football is you know … a grassroots game,
Whatever that may mean;
It’s one of those phrases as understood but as impreci […]

It was a perfect day for a perfect journey,
A trip back to the future on a train,
Past ridge and furrowed fields
About to lose their shape,
Beneath the celandine and cowslip;
Past mill race and turnpike and level […]

The mossy stones askew with time and gradient’s push,
No longer the mason’s pride and steadfast barrier
To uncultivated Nature’s ineluctable advance,
Meant that the old mill stream garden was no longer disce […]

Now I’m not a documentary fetishist,
But I have a memo for Post-Modernists,
And all the hyper-relativists,
That school of deconstructionists,
Including some post-structuralists,
Who reject the power of n […]

On squall-struck Rathlin Island,
Hard fast for Jura, Isla and Kintyre,
Robert the Bruce took his rowboat shelter,
In the sea splashed fissure of the dripping cave,
And there he watched a spider throw a gossamer […]

Suburban April Sunday,
Early morning dawn chorus wake up,
Hangover church bells chiming,
No milk for tea,
Run out of bread,
Buy the papers,
Study the tables,
And have your wife disturb your concentration
By […]

I opened the door to a gunmetal Belfast sky,
And clothed in my English prejudice,
I took a Good Friday walk up to Stormont,
Over odd bits of carpet soaked in disinfectant,
Past stickers on the Beech tree […]

(On Seeing a Satellite Dish Discarded on a Disused Railway Line)

Dish! Oh Dish!
Satellite-Murdoch Television Dish!
The object that so many people wish!
You used to stare so far away on high,
Receiving all those […]

We all want a trophy,
Instead of constant atrophy.

Do you remember collecting autographs,
When the football specials steamed back west,
When the last faint gleams of terrace street sun
Slipped behind the shadows of the stands,
And the ground went abruptly quiet […]

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle,
Than for a rich fan to enter heaven.

I saw a bus the other day,
No destination or number at the top,
Just an apologetic sign saying
“Sorry I’m not in Service”;
What intrigued me was not the fact
That the bus could read and write,
Which is,
Admi […]

“You don’t know what you’re doing”

“You’ve got ulcerated bone where the tibia meets the femur.”
“What’s that mean then?”
“It means you’ll never kick a ball again, son.”
“What, no more lying horizontal to the Earth’s surface,
Three feet u […]

In the year of Our Lord, 1800 and 23,
William Webb Ellis invented rug-bee,
He was playing football, when just for fun,
He picked up the ball and away he did run;
At a fee paying school, the pupils are master,
The […]