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UEFA Nations League?

joe morris

Monday, September 16th, 2024

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 So, answers on a postcard
On the subject of
The UEFA Nations League
Another bout of head scratching
Confusing imponderables
Rather like the earth being flat
Is there life out there?
It’s a week ago
Since Lee Carsley
And his brand new England
Set up the signpost for
Another foray in another direction
Some distant,
Unheralded location
A destination to who knows where?
Or just a fuss about nothing
The UEFA Nations League
Second rate, utterly inconsequential
UEFA sending out some meagre
Consolation prize
To an England team,
Stuck between the devil and deep blue sea.
Do they whip themselves
Into a genuine frenzy of excitement?
After the loss of two
Successive Euro Finals
And yet Irish eyes were tearful
At the Aviva last week
The Republic of Ireland
Green with envy at England’s
Promised land
Firstly a liberal sprinkling
Of Rice, Declan,
Initially of the Emerald Isle
But now lion hearted
England, fires the sweetest shot
A goal across the bows
Of Dublin and County Cork
Where the pumps of a thousand
Literary bars of Guinness
Once rang to the palpitating poetry
Of Joyce and Yeats, Oscar
At his wildest and most expressive
Then, just to rub salt into the wound
The Importance of Being Jack Grealish
Since it was he who completed
A spellbinding tapestry
Of wonderful, one two
Intricacy and the consummation
Of a marriage made in heaven
Close passing at its most dazzling
England carving through
The Republic of Ireland
A knife through butter
Grealish almost too smug
After declaring his Irish
Ancestral bloodstream
Then at Wembley on Tuesday
Finland finished off finally
Harry Kane, yet again
Goal scoring expertise
When most needed
But the UEFA Nations League
We sigh with reservations
Since none told us
About its job description
Its rightful place
In football’s bigger picture
An international anomaly,
Maybe, or yet another competition
With no vivid rhyme or reason
The jury has to be out on
This one, will the members
Please deliberate at both
Half time and full time
Since the World Cup now
Feels like some unfamiliar
Stranger to dear old Blighty
Another two years to go
For England to flow
And don’t England know
We’ve been here before

Notes

England, under the interim management of Lee Carsley, get off to a winning start in the UEFA Nations League against the Republic of Ireland and Finland.

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Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/uefa-nations-league/