Football Poets

Relegation- again in claret and blue

¶ 1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 You didn’t think it would ever happen
Yet here we are
Just over a decade later
Relegation in claret and blue clothes
West Ham, now cloaked in bleakness,
Darkness in dingy melancholy
Brooding desperately on
Creaking, groaning wooden
Terraces that now drown
Their sorrows
Over leaky corrugated roofs
Rusty turnstiles about to disintegrate
Into the lower depths
Of football’s not so celebrated
Citadels of genius and wealth
Tear stained faithful fans
Now lamenting what might have been
Collapsing in a crumpled heap
In football’s Championship
Fateful forebodings of doom
And gloom, Clouds of calamity
Facing the hapless Hammers
In London Stadium boozy assemblies
Tumbleweed flying across
No man’s land
Relegation again
Yes again
Gallows humour
Destined for the trapdoor
Familiarity breeding contempt
There seems no way out
That same old story
Ineptitude in their claret and blue
Blood cells, bitter gall
In burning throats of hurt
Now you think back to how
It could have been
If only Ron Greenwood had
Stayed for just a while longer
Back in the 1970s
For when England beckoned
Ron answered the call
In due course
And the vibrant life force
At Upton Park seeped
Through our dreams
For Ron had held it together
For well over two decades
West Ham wandering through
The comfortable lands of mediocrity
You were there on the final day
Of the season, facing the firing squad
The Liverpool of Keegan and Toshack
Heighway and Hughes set off the explosives
Along the Chicken Run
A 2-0 defeat and it was relegation
For the first time in ages
The old Second Division for three
Wearisome years, laborious plodding,
Grafting, scraping and scuffling
For crumbs of respectability
But that was never enough
This was the pivotal point when
It all unravelled like a cotton reel
West Ham among the lower downstairs
The ones who may never win
But one day might
We’ve seen it all before
Oldham, Blackburn Rovers, Millwall
And Preston for the claret and blue
Ensemble, it was demeaning, degrading
In the literal sense
Insufferable, unfathomable
Why and how for so long
Then local Ilford boy John Lyall
Arrived after years in youth
Team coach shadows
The manager on the day
When everything flourished
And blossomed on the first
Full flush of Cup Final day
In 1980, Arsenal beaten
At Wembley
Sir Trevor, Alan Devonshire,
Geoff Pike, Alvin Martin
Impassable Billy Bonds
Bonzo, a claret and blue
Brick wall of supremacy
Kings of the Barking Road
Crowned on the throne of
East End, rulers of the roost
West Ham win the FA Cup
But then there were the
Madcap yo yo years
Of the late 1980s, 90s
Trampolining between First
Division, then second
Before the Premiership
And the Premier League
On the day you were married
Bride and bridegroom greet
This gorgeous weekend
Clive Allen taps in
The vital winner against
Cambridge before the flood
Of claret and blue announce
The top flight again
But recently relegation
Bugles blast remorselessly
In our sound and vision
And yet 11 years ago
Sam Allardyce drags the
Hammers back into the Premier League
Full of bluster, bravado, devil may care
No regard perhaps to the subtleties,
Semantics and delicacies of
Football’s lace makers
At Manchester City, Arsenal, United
But West Ham United now clinging
On for dear life
In the most elite company
Claret and blue class
Of today’s product
Staring down the bottom of
The barrel
That guillotine chop
Send them down, Hammers
Sentenced to Championship when all seemed so rosy
Oh, wistful yearnings for
How it might have been
Had Ron Greenwood stamped
His intellectual footballing
Mark on the West Ham academy
It may have delayed the
Agony for a year or two
Still, who knows
Stranger things have been known
To happen
It may go to the wire
The final day
But doubts are understandable
Relegation now
Just a matter of time
Now a claret and blue
Engraving that lost its shine
Oh if only West Ham
Could find another Ron and John
Greenwood and Lyall
It just seems like a compatible
Combination
Two peas in a pod
It’s time to face the music
West Ham, we hope again
Please finish in 16th
And win the Euro Conference
Wishful thinking
But you never know

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