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To My Unknown Idol

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 Will you favour your right or your left foot?
Or be equally comfy with both?
Will you toil with an unflagging workrate?
Or be prone to the odd bout of sloth?

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 Will you hail from the slums of Sao Paulo?
Or be born a stone’s throw from my house?
Will you talk in some quaint foreign accent?
Or the purest and broadest of Scouse?

3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 Have I seen you on telly already?
With no inkling we’re destined to meet?
That before long indeed, I will drop to my knees,
And kiss the bare ground ‘neath your feet?

4 Leave a comment on verse 4 0 Will you net a nice brace on your debut?
Or take six months to get off the mark?
Will you play your first derby at Anfield?
Or be baptised at Goodison Park?

5 Leave a comment on verse 5 0 Will you shoot with an aim true as Sharpie’s?
Will you head with the power of Bob Latch?
Will your temper be fiery as Fergie’s?
Will you risk getting booked every match?

6 Leave a comment on verse 6 0 Will you amble like Harvey or Kendall?
Or Ballie, the third of those three?
Or rush round in a frenzy, like Duncan McKenzie?
(He was magic, don’t we all agree?)

7 Leave a comment on verse 7 0 If your passes are pinpoint like Dobbo’s,
Your reflexes as lethal as Links’,
I won’t care if you turn out a yobbo,
I’ll still be proud to stand you a drink.

8 Leave a comment on verse 8 0 Please don’t moan you’re not getting the service,
When the chances aren’t coming your way.
Nor maintain your team-mates of a night stay out late,
And all bunk off their training most days.

9 Leave a comment on verse 9 0 If it seems that the Gaffer don’t like you,
When he leaves you sat cold on the bench,
Spout no oaths in some outlandish lingo,
Like Norwegian, Glaswegian or French.

10 Leave a comment on verse 10 0 Pay no heed to the catcalls and carping,
When you go through a spell oh so lean.
Pray just shrug off the jibes and keep laughing,
Then score more in one season than Dean!

11 Leave a comment on verse 11 0 Never swear that our Blue Shirt is sacred,
Make no pledges of undying Love.
And then up sticks and dump us like Wayne did,
For some loot-laden posh Glamour Club.

12 Leave a comment on verse 12 0 O Idol, you’re but a chimera.
A figment, a prospect, a dream.
Yet I hope in some not-distant era,
You’ll be banging ‘em in for my team…

13 Leave a comment on verse 13 0 6/12/04
Denys E. W. Jones

Notes

This poem is a re-working of one by Rudyard Kipling entitled To The Unknown Goddess, in which the young Kipling speculates about the as yet unidentified woman who he knows is destined to be his wife. In my re-working, in similar fashion, I speculate about the as yet unidentified Everton Target Man, who in, say, five or six years will be spearheading the Everton attack, and hopefully, scoring with monotonous regularity…

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/to-my-unknown-idol/?shared=email&msg=fail