Untitled Document

The Beautiful Game: triptych

i. 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 male, 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!

ii. Sans culottes

Football is democracy: the masses chanting
WE WANT OUR TOTTENHAM BACK, KEEGAN OUT;
The game’s pure diamonds cut from backstreet grit
Kid black-pearl Pele in Rio sand kicking
His genius into shape; white working
Class honing factory-escape into art;
Algerian Zidane from race-ghettoed
Marseilles now Frenchman Of The Decade.

Football is fascist-fuelled global business:
Money yells louder than a stadium
And glibber than a done-good pundit;
One transferred striker could pay ten nurses
For life and - for torching the tedium
Of a worker’s week - fifty times his wages.

iii. Sex

Football is sex. When Beckham rammed that YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES
Down the crowd’s throat - having opened his account
With England - (with Campbell about to mount
Him behind) and swivelled his hips like a lech
Because he’d scored with a country, no less,
The earth was moving for us all (the doubts
Stripped off, the World’s Cups in our grasp like founts
Of milk and honey) and joined our nakedness.

Sex at its very best, for what is sex
But love, or God, without the permanence,
A crude attempt at ending loneliness?
And what is football but a lonely crowd
Trying to score, a fallen Man, united,
An Icarus in Eden standing proud ?