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National Football Museum

Terry Quinn

Friday, July 16th, 2004

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 I kept going back
To that point of time
Half way through the First Half
At the end of the gallery
Where it turns,
Less than a game,
More than a Cruyff,
Drifting past Calcio
Or ball games from China
Flat caps on village greens
To tassled cap for England.
1860 to 1870
The birth of the Blues
And the Reds and teams
Playing for love
And then the money
Playing for crowds
That just appeared.
They never looked back
I kept looking back
Leaving the kits
The tickets and Annuals,
Shirts signed by players
Of the PFA
And what held me most
The badly typed contracts
Sent to men of household fame
But I kept going back
To those first few years
To Public Schools and Houses
Sunday Schools and Rules
To factory gates that opened
On Saturdays for Three
Trying to find a reason
In the Beginning
Where’s the end
Finding a sort of answer
In a half time cup of tea
Gazing through the windows
At the floodlights and the spires
Both for that need for a future
In the present of the past
This priests’ town seemed the right town
To turn to
More than a game,
It was time for the Second Half.

Notes

I should make it clear that the Museum is in Preston, Lancashire and well worth visiting. It’s brilliant.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/national-football-museum/