David Beckham by the Poet Laureate and the ten best football poems

By Dan Silver in Mirror Football Blog

Published 15:15 16/03/10

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Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has put pen to paper for crocked David Beckham. Here's her poem Achilles, followed by our pick of the 10 best poems about football:

Achilles (for David Beckham)
Myth's river- where his mother dipped him, fished him, a slippery golden boyflowed on, his name on its lips. Without him, it was prophesised, they would not take Troy.

Women hid him, concealed him in girls' sarongs; days of sweetmeats, spices, silver songs... but when Odysseus came, with an athlete's build, a sword and a shield, he followed him to the battlefield, the crowd's roar, and it was sport, not war, his charmed foot on the ball... but then his heel, his heel, his heel...

The 10 best football poems:

1) 'Zinedine Zidane' by Francis Duggan
Football fan and poet Francis Duggan defends one of the greatest players of his generation after his infamous head-butt in the 2006 World Cup final.

2) 'V' by Tony Harrison
In this controversial work by Leeds United supporter, Tony Harrison, the use of v for 'versus' goes from football to the Miner's Strike (warning: contains very strong language).

3) 'Gosh It's Tosh Collection' by John Toshack
Welsh manager John Toshack turned to poetry in his Liverpool days, with unforgettable lines like "I just flew in from Barcelona/Now I'm going for a sauna" and "Poems don't grow on trees/And you ain't forthcoming with any fees!!"

4) 'Twice a Week the Winter Thorough' by A. E. Housman
From his 1919 collection 'A Shropshire Lad', Housman emphasises how the struggle of war is mirrored in sport.

5) 'Old Schooldays' by Andrew Barton Paterson
Heroic young schoolboys who long for the release of 'a practice in the park' to escape the grip of their villainous schoolmaster.

6) ' Träumerei' by Philip Larkin
Larkin's preoccupation with mortality sees him compare the trauma of the mass exiting of a football match with a march towards death. Not surprisingly, he was a Hull fan.

7) 'To win a game' by Ivan Donn Carswell
It is the much maligned figure of the referee that provides that answer to the question: 'How do you win a football game?'

8) 'To Sir Bobby from Daft as a Brush (Gazza)'
Troubled genius Paul Gascoigne penned this ode to his late mentor, praising him as "a great man/Even better than Peter Pan". Contains the best opening stanza since TS Eliot's The Wasteland.

9) 'Disabled' by Wilfred Owen
Acclaimed trench poet encapsulates the frustration of a returning soldier who loses the use of his legs and never play football again.

10) 'MCMXIV' by Philip Larkin
Larkin again, comparing the wide-eyed optimism of men waiting to be recruited to the army to that of fans queuing outside Villa Park. He didn't go during the David O'Leary era, then.

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