Football Poets

The early April afternoon was glorious.

The daffs were out, I felt Wordsworthian.

You’d come down from York to look

at houses. We caroused that evening

with old friends in the Railway Tavern – […]

I won’t mention the team. The reason?
I’d like most readers to stick
with this beyond the first lines.
It isn’t which club, or even football,
but about a father and daughter
forming an unexpected, unbre […]

Impatient men and boys waited
outside newsagents at six o’clock,
for vans to deliver their bundles.
News or Standard? Rival
papers competed to produce
Saturday night sports papers,
all the football s […]

The beckoning floodlights
still work their magic,
early October’s comforting chill,
scarf snug round the neck.
Blood pulses through arteries,
moving as it should. Heart lifts
with every step towards the s […]

It seems like a dream now:
the 1-4 scoreline;
Lampard’s goal that never was;
watching the game with Carol Ann Duffy.

She turned up amid the half-time gloom
in the pub, asked if it was ok
to sit near the T […]

‘The goalkeeper’s fear of the penalty’ –
but shouldn’t a striker fear it
so much more? The keeper isn’t
expected to save; the forward
is obliged to score. A penalty
can help break the duck,
if you’re […]

As the boos rang out at the Riverside
I remembered my team’s
first black player
coming on as sub in the 80s,
the storm of hate from the Shed.

The shock and anguish I felt,
wondering if I could c […]

A winter’s day, a darkening sky. Warned

by the ref midway through the first half

for over-enthusiastic touchline coaching:

I don’t know what you’re on, but I want some of it.

Those games meant […]

Look at it not so much as a game
of two halves – although it was that,
too – but the result of fixture congestion.
Pure and simple. Two crucial matches,
far too close together. A great win up north,
d […]

It may be just a pre-season friendly,
he’s the wrong side of thirty; I still
get the same joy watching him play.
Diehard tackles, rampaging forward,
exhorting teammates, lusting for goals.

I’m double his […]