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Fever

david lyall

Saturday, December 10th, 2005

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 Fever

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 ‘Not a matter of life and death,’ said Shanks,
‘more important than that.’
More about memory being framed,
like by that huge telly in the games room in Bournemouth,
the sun slanting in,
and boys in shorts on the arms of the sofa,
watching the garish analogue orange of the Dutch.

3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 1974. I wasn’t too bothered then.
We’d had the sandcastle competition
and Richard had lost his camera.
I went up to bed rather than watch; I wanted that top bunk.

4 Leave a comment on verse 4 0 That’s the first I really remember.
Before that all I get is my dad filling up the ‘Traveller at Shell,
handing me free coins of footballers I didn’t know,
like Colin Bell.

5 Leave a comment on verse 5 0 The late 70’s were dull; only memorable
for the Scots crowing out of the box
on Top of the Pops.
That was the year of ticker tape and smiling Argentineans.

6 Leave a comment on verse 6 0 Poor Kevin, that header you missed in ‘82
did not look so wide on my mum’s television.
But with England out, I spent the next week with friends
learning to smoke and drinking 50p cans of Kestrel
on a grass verge outside the library.

7 Leave a comment on verse 7 0 I watched ‘100 World Cup moments’ recently,
but unsurprisingly, they didn’t recreate
the stifling heat of that top floor flat in Clapton,
the shouts and stamps of the Africans in the flat below
coming up through the floor when Cameroon went ahead.
And the cherished silence when Lineker
put the second of two penalties in.

8 Leave a comment on verse 8 0 The Whitely Hall Building, Stafford,
awash with weak lager and hormonal students.
Hot and heady with music pounding,
the big screen on the wall almost an irrelevance
amid the sexual excitement.
I stood at the bar with Bob, my elbows soaked in slops,
staring at the lime green grass.

9 Leave a comment on verse 9 0 In this place there are no photographs.
There is no record of it. Only what
you have known in your own head
and never thought of again in 20 years,
the internal monologue of memory:

10 Leave a comment on verse 10 0 Love and hurt and sun soaked disappointment;
joy and grief
and everything
fading slowly away like washed out colours.

© david lyall 2005

Notes

I wrote this as a way of chronicling what world cups over the years mean to an individual, often associated more with what’s going on in life than the football….although that is still crushingly important!

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/fever/