The Beautiful Game

 

Ascension 2022 (England Win The Euros)

“He fell over! I would chant gleefully

At any woman player I saw faking it

Like a man, which (for old boys mistaking it)

Was to be heard, self-satirically,

As revenge on the tittering twattery

Abuse of glorious athletes in bloke-kit

Made so female, fluent and fabulously fit,

My her-zero joke should be his-story.

Now, in parks, homes, schools, wherever white is worn, 

Earps, Bright, Bronze, Daly, Stanway, Williamson, 

Stokes, Wubben-May, Carter, Greenwood, Walsh,

Scott, Kirby, Mead, Hemp, White, Roebuck, Hampton,

Toone, Parris-Kelly, England, Russo; all’s

Changed, utterly: an empowering beauty is born.

55 Years of Heart  (Euros 2020)

Half a century ago in ’66,
I was a winger with galloping dreams
As yet unbroken, at the heart of teams
Wholler than our sums, advancing on sticks
That were our All-winning goal, with flicks
And traps and angled chips and screams
Of Bobby! Shoot! Jack! Man on! across still green
Somer pastures, haymakers high on kicks.

When you stepped up to take that penalty won
For me and that dream, oh, if words could block
The poison boos of anti-fans who’ve lost
All heart (led up a serpent path of ‘Ein
Volk, Ein Reich’) and spit them to heaven, these would,
Your names a sky of stars: Saka, Sancho, Rashford…

Football is Balls

Football is balls: needs pumped up balls to play
And all the hype comes down at last to balls
And as that US star Reveals Her All
(Well, sponsor-labelled sportsbra anyway)
To breathless world photographers, to say
WE’VE WON THE WOMEN’S FIRST WORLD CUP! it’s all
The culture of the buck, sharp market stalls
Of bluff and thrust, done derring deals, wha-hae!

But, O, when Stuart Pearce was on the spot
He’d failed to hit in World Cup Italy
(His name in running blood on England’s walls)
And flew across the Wembley turf and shot,
A nation’s trembling heart in mouth, to see
The world he kicked thump in, what - massive- balls!

1966 (England 4 Germany W. 2) 

“We won the war- in 1966!” 
My Welsh mum beamed in the red-hatted sun, 
Commanding me to hoist The Flag upon 
Our council pebbledash, porch and privets, 
The Somerset exile in which she lived: 
And we'd all died, she piped, when that German 
Last ditch never-was-a-free-kick spun 
Off Cohen's knee and fell to foreign tricks. 

It was The Victor's never ending tale 
Of under-doggéd gung-ho Beat-all Brits - 
Each Daily written off by Mother’s Mail -  
Moore, Peters, Hurst, Banks, Stiles, Charlton, Wilson, 
Cohen, Hunt, Ball, refashioned as Hendrix, 
A mini-short beauty born to die young.

The Beautiful Game

Football is art’s reflection of oneness
In a world of divisions; of beauty’s truth
Leaping muscle-bound fouls; the dreams of youth
Without its injured ordinariness
Or age’s silting of its genius;
The Best without its thickening uncouth
Slurred self-disgrace or bruising disproof
By yobs in boots; the angel dance of studs:

- Like Pele’s pass, to gift a certain goal
He’d made his own, to some more mortal bloke
He knew without a call or look was there;
- Diego’s second goal that turned a whole
Defence, a childhood’s poverties, to air
More light than hand of God or head of coke.