Football Poets

Hammers beat the Gooners

¶ 1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 Now there’s a rarity
Almost as unusual
As the eclipse of the moon
For the first time
Since the outbreak of the
Boer war,
Ladysmith conflict
The Crimean dust up,
Bayeux Tapestry
When Harold met
William the Conqueror
Or the Tudor Stewarts
Fraternised with the
Medieval busybodies
Lost in the mists of time
Since Henry the Eighth
Was a lad in shorts
A stripling and yet
To meet the wives
Who would become his
Innocent victims
But then suddenly
1980 arrived
In all her high tech
Promise and new age
Of splendour
When Maggie made her
First tentative steps
Towards the land of
No turning,
Stubbornness
In a blue power suit
Quite frequently
Thatcherism in
Full domineering watch
Unemployment three million
The full stop of the mining
Industry that perished
With the finality of a
Punctuation mark
Rears head of grotesquerie
Sir Trev stoops to conquer
From Dev’s perfectly weighted cross
Heads he won
Cross at the by line
In 1980 FA Cup Final
Yes we were there
Not within Wembley’s old
Towers
But witnessing from home
While huge waterfalls
Of claret and blue
Cascaded from Wembley Park
Engulfing East End drinking
Hostelries with overwhelming
Delight, West Ham of the old
Second Division downing the
The monarchy of Highbury’s
Marbled halls
But since 1980 nothing of any
Repute or renown
Since then the Falklands
War, yet another comedy
Club of Prime Ministers
The never ending IRA troubles
Finally reaching blissful conclusion
On the Good Friday agreement
But the tables were turned
On that fateful day at the beginning
Of the 1980s
For the first time since
Queen Victoria
Spent her first day
Of surveying her empire
And the commonwealth
Dickens was just a wee lad
In literary thoughts and dishevelled trousers
West Ham winners over the
Gunners cannon fire
Last night, they who
Belonged to the North London regiment
Beaten not quite to a pulp
But Arsenal’s first defeat
Of the Premier League season
In the Alan Hardaker Cup,
Once sponsored by a department
Store or Pools company
Who cared which?
Once the milk of human kindness
The Milk Cup
A bizarre nod
To football’s wholesome calcium
The League Cup in its
Original manifestation
Designed for the lower classes
The downtrodden who always
Struggled against the tides of time
Hard to believe now
But Rochdale and Norwich once
Saw a brief glimpse
Of the League Cup
A fleeting flirtation
With the big time
But then horrific silence
Nothing but Saturdays
Against Torquay and Barrow
And terraces yawning
With battle fatigue
But how we loved the underdogs
The League Cup was their shop
Window of opportunity
But the Hammers beat the Gunners
Last night. Hard to believe
In retrospect
It never happens
If memory serves you correctly
The last time was Vietnam
Since you can still see Nixon’s tears
After Watergate
Saturating the White House
Bobby Moore was in goal
When the Irons were beaten
By the Potteries in
the League Cup semi final
It does seem like a million
Years ago
Stoke overcame the Kensington
Set of now multi millionaires
Chelsea, good old Chelsea
We were so proud to call your name
In the 1972 Alan Hardaker Cup
Splendid Chelsea
The mantra uttered by David Webb,
Ian Hutchinson, the
Stamford Bridge stunners
But not since the English Civil
War, the Wars of the Roses
Or quite possibly the Tudor Stewarts
Were waging private battles
West Ham finally beat Arsenal
You can hear the stevedores
With their metallic grind of steel
Over those East End dockyards
Calling out raucously from the distant past
Rattles and caps in perfect unison
From the diligent factory gate
Ladies and Gentlemen
Miracles do happen
And claret and blue breaks
With precedent
Jarred Bowen, an own goal
And Muhammad Kudus
Sealed the kudos
Victory incarnate
Only the Carabao Cup
Admittedly
But West Ham
Through to the last eight
Still a feather in the cap
In the land of Hardaker’s
Brain child
So many decades
Down the line
But welcome nonetheless
Oh for the joys of the
League Cup.

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