Football Poets

On the Banks of the Bisagno

On the Banks of the Bisagno,
There stands a Football Ground.
It’s stood for many long, long years,
Defiant, firm and proud.

What matches it has seen played out,
What goals, what thrills, what spills.
And what an atmosphere’s kicked up
When full of fans it’s filled.

I’ve been there many times myself,
First went in Eighty-Three.
I was a fresh-faced student then,
Soon be an OAP!

Can’t say how much I’ve witnessed,
Stood there on my two feet.
I’ve seen it all, dull nil-nil draws,
Big wins, painful defeats.

Now if you are a tourist,
And football floats your boat,
You might care to take in a match,
Regret it you sure won’t.

This Ground is not so hard to find,
Seek out a Taxi Rank,
And when the cabbie asks “Where to?”
Just say “Bisagno’s Banks!”

4/2/26
Denys E. W. Jones

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What’s in a Name

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
So says Juliet in her Balcony Speech.
And when we hear or read it, most nod and agree.
Only I beg to differ. Consider the following:
Burnden Park, Highbury, The Goldstone Ground,
Maine Road, Filbert Street, Griffin Park, Goodison Park.
To me such names indeed are sweet.
They smell of 3pm kick-offs,
Shirts unsullied by Sponsors’ names,
Affordable ticket prices, fairplay,
The Good Old Days,
When God was in His Heaven and all was right,
And nobody had heard of naming rights.

Now how about these?
The Toughsheet Community Stadium, The Emirates Stadium,
The Amex Stadium, The Etihad Stadium,
The King Power Stadium, The Gtech Community Stadium,
And …The Hill Dickinson Stadium!
Mr Shakespeare, are you seriously telling me
This second group smells as sweet as the first?
To me the latter reek of ££££ and $$$$,
Merchandising, Sportswashing,
Sponsors’ names splashed over Shirts,
12.30 kick-offs, Corporate Ownership,
State Ownership, gamesmanship, inflated ticket prices.
They sum up all that’s wrong with the Modern Game.
To be blunt, IMHO, they stink.
So readers, next time you hear or read Juliet’s Speech,
Just think…

31/5/25
Denys E. W. Jones

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Gone But Not Forgotten

There’s a new build housing estate
in all our cities and towns.
On sites of factories and warehouses
for stuff we don’t make any more.
Places of toil, unloved and forgotten
working all hours just to pay some bills.

But there’s others that maybe look the same,
where street signs hint of something else.
No bucolic names of rural plants,
or trees where there’s none for miles around,
but footballers whose time has passed,
a nod to what was here before.

Maybe a blue plaque on a wall outside,
or a silver disc for a centre spot,
by a playground where today’s kids act out
their own superhero or sporting dreams,
lifted from TV, streaming, or a latest film,
voices bouncing off unweathered walls.

But in gardens both near and miles away,
You’ll find plastic seats ripped out from stands,
from a pitch invasion at the final game,
turf grass in pots on windowsills,
and boxes of programmes from a now lost ground,
that only lives on in the memory of fans,

and former players who occasionally
shuffle these roads to reminisce,
to work out where the goals once stood,
take an imaginary kick at an imaginary ball,
watch the bulging net, the crowd go wild,
before turning slowly to walk away.

Yet sometimes here on unsettled days,
when rain beats down and the wind lets rip,
whipping round walls and pulling at roofs,
a sound will rise as the air pressure falls,
a crescendo now unmistakably so,
of thousands of voices cheering a goal.

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