Football Poets

Liverpool- Arsenal

¶ 1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 Oh for the teeth clenching
Agonising, hiding behind
Transistor radios that are
A traditional metaphor
For the last day of the
Premier League season
Finger nails bitten
In chronic anxiety
But today, the
Season takes a sharp chicane
Before leaving its smoky vapours
Pouring from exhausted exhausts
Liverpool against Arsenal
Take centre stage
It feels like 1989
When Michael Thomas
Pre-empted lovely Brian
Moore’s so apt summary
‘It’s up for grabs’
And Thomas lunges out
A dramatic foot
Arsenal win the old
First Division by
A hairs breadth no more
Than a slender thread
It couldn’t have come any
Closer
Anfield shocked to the
Core, King Kenny
Barely believing
The evidence of his eyes
But then this was always
The case between the Reds
Of Merseyside and the even
More magenta and crimson
Pillar box red of Arsenal
Who had to be satisfied
With yellow on this Friday night
That broke the mould
Then at the beginning of the 21st
Century, the birthplace of new
Adventures for both
Liverpool and Arsenal
Meet head to head in Cardiff
FA Cup Final, 2001
For it was another breathless year
A very young Michael Owen
Unfurled his youthful toreador’s
Cape of Good Hope
Liverpool find retribution
For the 1971 meeting
Of great minds
Owen scores the decisive winner
So that the Kop can release all
Of that pent up emotion
Therapy for the masses on the Mersey
Liverpool, enraptured by the historic
Pages of the FA Cup,
In thrall to its timeless charms
And yet back in 1971
Arsenal poised to complete
The rarest of Doubles
First Division League champions
Ensured at the furnace heat
Of White Hart Lane
Cut throat tensions
Ray Kennedy
Gives Spurs the bloodiest
Of noses
At Wembley days later
Charlie George
A 1970s poster boy
Crashes home winner
For the grateful Gunners
A shot of such
Bloodthirsty savagery
And vigorous, vehement
Intent that some believe
Victorious voices could
Still be heard at Highbury
Cheering from Gillespie Road
Arsenal they insist in London
Tube station vernacular
Shaking from the rafters
Where the Clock End
Reverberating to hymnns of joy
Win the first of Double Diamonds
Yours is a pint
Hours after the FA Cup
Final at the dawn of the Seventies
And was it George Graham
Or Eddie Kelly squeezing home
The first of
Arsenal’s opening salvo?
So it is once again
This afternoon,
Circumstances almost
Completely unlike
Anything that high society
Had predicted
At season’s beginning
Liverpool, not nearly
Their familiar selves
And out of the running
For anything in particular
Europe, a distant destination
Not even close to their best
Mid table now
More Majorca bound rather
Than Champions League
But nonetheless still
A magical name on the lips
Of the elite and discerning
League champions and most
Recently Premier League champs
A class above all the rest
This afternoon Arsenal head
For Anfield as Premier League
Champions in all but name
Five now but quite possibly
Eight points in front
Surely or maybe
We’re jumping the gun
Mikel Arteta’s supreme Gunners
Irresistible as the first day
Of spring, autumn and winter
Life in all of its profuse blossom
The Arsenal of Xhaka, Partey, Jesus,
Saka, Odegaard, a valiant Viking,
All of the right fixtures and fittings
A compelling vision of red sunsets
Over North London’s Easter Parade
Bring your eggs of chocolate
To Arsenal’s open top bus of triumph
Champions again
Unless we’re very much mistaken
Not so much a case of where but
When.

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