Football Poets

Keats Moore Likely Lads+Baudrillard @ Crown/Sceptre

¶ 1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 Buddleia in broad gauge bloom down on Stroud station,
Crazy golf flags out at the Brunel Goods Shed,
As I lazily read the Stroud News on the train to London,
Until I came across Rodda Thomas of Crown and Sceptre fame:
‘’ The whole game, in real time, kicking off at 3pm on Saturday,
exactly 50 years to the minute since the real game kicked off …
We will also pretend not to know the final score and it will be only 10 shillings
(50 p in new money) a ticket too.”
This struck me as a sort of post-modernist collision with the Likely Lads:
The No Hiding Place episode when they try to avoid finding out
The score of an England game before watching the highlights on TV …
But now with the clever conceit of a pub post-modernist TV twist …
This time we actually know the score but pretend we don’t …
Not so much a suspension of disbelief as a suspension of knowledge …
I suppose that’s why Chris Farlowe was number one on the day:
‘Out of Time’, July 30th 1966.

¶ 2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 The train trundled on to Swindon and more Stroud news from 1966,
Real, this time, no pretending:
The Cainscross and Ebley Co-op bread vans were being withdrawn,
Losing money, shopping habits changing, supermarkets …
Mr. and Mrs. Staines, directors of Taylor Bros Ltd since the war,
Were retiring and so the 70 year firm in Gloucester Street was to close:
The newspaper said it
‘Had served generations of cycling schoolboys
and vehicle owners in its 70-year history.’

¶ 3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 There was no mention of where cycling schoolgirls might go.

¶ 4 Leave a comment on verse 4 0 By Didcot, I was on to the Guardian, to discover another World Cup tale:
The blue plaque unveiling at Bobby Moore’s childhood Barking home –
His daughter, Roberta, said:
“This is where it all began – kicking a ball out here in the street
with his friends before embarking on an incredible journey
which we all know led him up the steps to collect the World Cup
from the Queen at Wembley 50 years ago this week.’
By now, I really was beginning to think that everything really is all interlinked,
In a cosmic hyper-reality Alice through the Looking Glass sort of way,
Obvs,
Especially when we got to Reading,
Where I was now on the Guardian G2, and serendipitously reading
About John Keats’ ‘negative capability’, or, as Stuart Jefferies put it:
Humanity ‘is capable of being in uncertain systematic doubt,
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’

¶ 5 Leave a comment on verse 5 0 Which is just what we’ll be doing up at the Crown and Sceptre, I suppose,
In a sort of post-modernist, knowingly ironic self-referential way,
Where John Keats meets Bobby Moore meets the Likely Lads
Meets Jean Baudrillard sort of thing,
(Blimey! There goes Battle of Britain class, Lord Dowding,
34052 in steam at Southall – perhaps it is 1966.),
And it was all very well for Baudrillard to say:
“Power is only to willing to allow football
a diabolical responsibility for stupefying the masses”,
And I daresay I might agree with him,
But I’ll see you up the pub on Saturday,

¶ 6 Leave a comment on verse 6 0 For once, I really can’t see us losing.
Can you?
Might go to extra time though.

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