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Only a game?

Peter Goulding

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 This remarkable book,
which brought him great acclaim.
The epithet stuck –
was it only a game?
A journeyman’s tale
in the second division,
Ambition grown stale
and inviting derision.
“I couldn’t care less,”
he intoned near the end,
“for the men of the press
and the tripe that they’ve penned.
They sit on their eyries
massaging the truth
to fit in with their theories,
however uncouth.
The facts must be twisted
to shore up their views
and half-truths are listed
as what they call ‘news.’”

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 Ironic’s the word
that springs soonest to mind.
Is his memory blurred?
Is he really that blind?
He’s made a nice living
by doing just that,
with his warped, unforgiving
and motive-strewn chat!
The men he’s destroyed
with his merciless pen,
the venom deployed
without counting to ten.
And who says he’s correct
in the theories he floats?

3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 Himself, I expect,
As tradition denotes.

© Peter Goulding 11th July 2007

Notes

One of the great football books of all time, Eamonn Dunphy’s “Only a game,” pours scorn on journalists who ignore the truth and try to warp facts to support their own view of the game. And Eamonn, probably Ireland’s most hated and most listened-to football journalist, has spent years doing precisely that.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/only-a-game-3/