I love football, and I’ve long admired the football reporter’s skill in being able to analyse a game and spot just who did score that goal in a goalmouth scramble! You need eyes like a hawk.
I’ve seen matches from a press box perspective and marveled at the wisdom and knowledge of those reporters. I remember the words of a sports desk man when I covered football early in my career: “We want to know why they lost, not how they lost.”
The poem is written in my default setting: mainly eight beats to the bar, or eight words, syllables or phonemes per line. (VAR might just spot the odd seven beats!)
Football is a simple game at heart, enhanced by the breath-taking skills of the players, so the majority of the words are simple, single syllable words. The end lines rhyme with the first line of the next verse – my version of passing the ball in poetic style.