50 Ways to Score a Goal and Other Football Poems

Product Information

There are poems by a range of authors about all kinds of football matches – including meteorite footballs, football on the moon, a witches versus wizards football match, the goalie with expanding hands, and the Stone Age man who invented football. Jester’s Hats’ would make a good funeral poem for a football fan who passed his enthusiasm onto his children.

The truce wasn’t total, and on Christmas Day 1914 there was some fighting on the western front; but Duffy’s poem homes in on the temporary cessation of hostilities – and those parts of the trenches where the battleground was made into a football pitch. During Crystal Palace v Burnley, Ally McCoist and Jon Champion referred to Roy Hodgson’s age as the oldest-ever Premier League manager and second-oldest in football league history,” says Mark Stephenson. It’s about the 2006 World Cup final, with the truly magnifique translated chorus: ‘Zidane hit it, Zidane beat it, headbutt! That becomes clear when you read Findlay’s latest work, 100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems, an edited odyssey through the nation’s cultural history, seen through the prisms of poetry and football. The power of football as a way of ‘fighting sorrow’ also chimes with the message we find elsewhere in A Shropshire Lad: that male bonding, friendship, and neighbourly solidarity are all features of rural village life.The theme of this chapbook is high school in general, which makes sense when you learn that Al Ortolani taught English for 43 years (eclipsing my record by a whopping 18 years, bless him).

While Jesus said ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’, Cookson pays tribute to the ‘tea makers’ – and everyone else who makes match day possible. We’ve also picked out a few verses about popular football teams, such as Manchester United and Liverpool FC. If you polled one hundred 50-year-old men who played high school football “back in the day” (as everyone says “up in this day”), you’d find a more nuanced response. Discover more classic poetry with our pick of the best poems about sports, these classic baby poems, and these great Rudyard Kipling poems. This collection captures the passion Scots feel about football, covering every aspect of the game, from World Cup heartbreak to one-on-ones with the goalie.

As for those going to work, they will no doubt burn some water-cooler time discussing the merits of Super Bowl commercials, even to the point of grading them.

True, football is a team sport and feeds off the energy and will of the group, but it’s bigger than that. We also recommend The Oxford Book of English Verse – perhaps the best poetry anthology on the market (we offer our pick of the best poetry anthologies here, and list the best books for the poetry student here). Stephen handed over the baton to our current leader Jim Mackintosh, who has been in charge of our Poetry Collection since 2019, with Julie McNeill taking over in late 2021. There’s a poem capturing the romance of children playing street football until it’s almost too dark to see the ball, and another in which going to the match is a rite of passage for an immigrant boy seeking to belong.The collection brings together popular culture with literature, fan with critic, and brings together subject matters as unlikely as the header and philosophy. Eddy from Oxfordshire asks: “Following Diego Costa’s near-heroics against Barcelona on 30 June, has any player actually achieved the magnificent hat-trick of a missed penalty, an own goal and a red card? Thus, along with the three you can find via the link above, I’m adding Ortolani’s poem to the Super Bowl Hall of Poetry Fame.

In simple terms, it finds a simple truth about football and what the game means to boys who take it seriously. Full of poems that will make you giggle about all things football, including being left out of the World Cup squad, mum's opinion on Messi vs Ronaldo, or those unmissable fixtures:I? Ben Wilkinson digs further: “I can happily report many modern poets have written on the beautiful (and not so beautiful) game. In other countries, football is taken seriously enough, but only in Scotland is the game woven into the warp and weft of cultural life so seamlessly. If you polled one hundred high school football players, asking how well football and poetry go together, you’d probably find unanimous agreement that they don’t.It covers lots of topics, but one of its main points is that football can be a powerful source of inspiration for normal, working people. Become immersed in the emotion and personality of the game as these poems reflect human experience in its sheer diversity of feeling and being. Calendar arrived safely in plastic-free packaging - which I've not seen before with a calendar, so kudos for that. By bidding on, or purchasing this item, you are agreeing to us sharing your name and address details with that 3rd party supplier to allow us to fulfil our contractual obligations to you.