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The ballad of Brian Glanville

joe morris

Sunday, May 18th, 2025

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 And so the world of football literature
Pays homage and tribute
To the man who coined
The Greed is Good League
Brian Glanville
Poet and connoisseur
Of football’s greatest moments
Picked from the grapes
Of football’s finest vineyards
Of purple prose
The sweetest of confections
Verse and stanza
Arsenal from boy to man
Penning his first masterpiece
At the tender age of 17,
When Cliff Bastin was fleet of foot
At Highbury’s loftiest pulpit
Our Brian delivered the most eloquent sermons
Dipping his ink into print
When the Sunday Times came calling
Glanville challenged the football
Establishment in no uncertain terms
Toppling to the ground
Those stubborn hierarchies
Although Sir Bobby Robson
In his words
Was grotesquely overrated
But surely not
And yet this was the unvarnished
Truth, according to the
Glanville book,
Novels and plays
Oozing from every fibre
Of his being
A genius and magician
Of the written word
Just precise and pungent
Honesty pouring from his
Bloodstream
Every pulmonary gland
All of those football arteries
And veins overflowing
With the right turn of phrase
Throughout the halcyon days
Of Bertie Mee, even
Herbert Chapman
Our Brian recalled his
Championship winning pomp
From the roaring 1920s
And then 1930s
First the Terriers
Of Huddersfield
Snapping and snarling at the
Heels of the
Movers and shakers
In football’s top flight
Before Charlie George
Slumped to the ground
And Arsenal clinched the
Double at White Hart Lane
Glanville at his most magisterial
In World Soccer columns
Of imposing height
Still delivering homilies
On the Italian job
Almost repeating the
Defensive catenaccio
And rightly so
Fiercely critical
Of Milan, Inter, AC,
Juventus and Napoli
Fluent in the language
The beauty and grandeur
Of Serie A
So we say thankyou
Brian Glanville
Never forget the final,
Sumptuous word
The best in the business
Undoubtedly so.

Notes

So here’s my tribute to the late and great Brian Glanville who has now sadly passed away at the age of 93.

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Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/the-ballad-of-brian-glanville/