Planet Football

Mary Hannigan’s Sideways Look At The World Of Soccer
Poet Duffy feels Beckham's woe, hack Morgan has a go
TRUE, THERE was a bit of a no-frills feel about it, but our favourite football poem has always been Peter Handke’s salute to the FC Nuremberg team of 1968. It went like this: “Wabra – Leupold – Popp – Ludwig Muller – Wenauer – Blankenburg – Starek – Strehl – Brungs – Heinz Müller – Volkert. Kick off: 15 o’clock.”
Yep, it was just the line-up and start-time from a cup game against Bayer Leverkusen, but seeing as football IS poetry, what else would you need? For example, if you were addressing the big football story in England last week you’d opt for: “Beckham. Achilles. Ruptured. Season. Over. Poor. Lad.” Unless you’re the poet laureate, that is:
“Myth’s river – where his mother dipped him, fished him, a slippery golden boy flowed on, his name on its lips.
“Without him, it was prophesied, 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 . . .”
Yes, Carol Ann Duffy was moved to pen this ode, David Beckham’s Achilles injury , after his World Cup hopes ended. “It’s fascinating the injury takes its name from Achilles,” she told the BBC, “the whole point of Greek myths is the combination of triumph and tragedy we follow in them. He is almost a mythical figure himself.”
It would be fairly accurate to say that Piers Morgan, in his Daily Mail column, doesn’t quite share Duffy’s feelings:“Compared with genuinely loyal United heroes like Giggs, Scholes and Neville, Beckham’s been a treacherous, money-grabbing, club-hopping, fame-hungry, egotistical little weasel who likes nothing better than making everything all about HIM,” Morgan wrote. Nice.

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