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Poem of the Month - February 2008
Fitba Cliche
(the ba’s no for eatin)
I remember being told by big MacIntyre
tae take mair time oan the ba. Listen, son, he says,
ye’re playin like the gress wis oan fire,
ye’re blindin us a’ wi’ the stour.
This is a gemm fur men,
no boays, or weans, or jessies.
if ye’re good enough, yer big enough, they say,
but, never listen or play tae the crowd,
an’ forget all yer faither’s advice,
an’ yer great-uncle Tam’s an a’,
whae played wi’ Champfleurie Violet’s Cup Winning Team.
They days are gaun, like snaw aff
a Geordie Young clearance.
Then
it was the people’s gemm,
a’ aboot the ba, and beatin’ yer men,
this way then that, then swingin it ower frae the wing,
an up like a bird tae heid it awa’ an intae the net.
The goalie, auld as yer faither an dressed like yer granny,
stuck in the mud like a big stranded whale, Goal!
And a hundred thousand voices sang in Hampden Park.
Ye couldnae see the sun fur bunnets.
Romantic?
Aye! And a’ for the glory o’ it.
Well, that’s a shite noo son,
the ba’s no for eatin oanie mair.
Time was
when ye could tell a prospect
by the way he shed his hair,
or jouked by his relations in the scullery,
but, we still believed in Empire then,
ken,
when the Wee Blue Devils buried themselves at the England End,
and half o’ Europe, for a glory that wisnae worth haen,
oor ain, singin and deein like cattle,
brought hame not one lullaby in gaelic.
In the room the punters come and go
Talking of Di Stephano
On the terraces,
beneath the stand,
a poet speaks for a nation:
the ref’s a baam.
We,
whaur the comic and the cosmic meet,
an ambulance hall, a crowded street,
a psyche and a jersey stepped ower dark
b’the ruck, a people still, unique,
manouevrin, multiform and chic, aye missus,
chic as fuck.
SCOT-LAND! SCOT-LAND! SCOT-LAND!
Scotland,
turn yir backs tae the grandstand,
forget the suicide ba’,
think mair o keepin possession,
Christ, frae some o yer ain side ana’,
Listen.
Ye cannae play fitba’ withoot the ba’, okay?
An ye cannae govern yerself without a country,
even if ye are oan the committee.
(England taught us that)
Right then,
Play wir ain gemm,
afore the ba’ eats us.
Again!
Alistair Findlay
From 100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems (Luath, 2007)
Poem supplied courtesy of the Scottish Poetry Library |
The Inspiration for the Poem
Alistair says:
'The poem was first published in Chapman, summer, 1995. It is about Scottish 'identity' which was much in debate at the time, as it had been since the Referendum debacle in the late 1970s. I was a member of the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly in the 1980s, believing that internationalism is predicated on a confident sense of cultural and political identity which nations are then better able to allow/recognise/respect in other nations, races, creeds.
The poem is in the form of a discursive monologue, probably borrowed from MacDiarmid's Drunk Man. The speaker mixes the metaphors of war (including class-war) and the religion of socialism (including sectarianism) with those of football - which seems to me, not excluding a bit of Anglophobia (rightly in the case of Mrs Thatcher's kind of Englishness), to express the popular consciousness of the average Scot (male, of course), who possesses a nation but not a state. This is at one level but, being a poem, it also operates, accurately as it happens, at another level, with the speaker envisaged as being an older (professional) footballer giving a 'team-talk' on the 'real' realities of 'the game' (of football rather than of the politics of national-social identity) to a new recruit/novice to 'the team' - reflecting some of my actual experience, having been a youngster on Hibernian FC's books between 1965-68.
The poem was published along with 17 other football poems in Sex, Death and Football (Luath, 2003) and just recently in 100 Favourite Scottish Football Poems, which I edited, again for Luath Press.'
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About the Poet
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Alistair Findlay was born in 1949 in Winchburgh, the fourth son of a fourth generation shale miner, Bob Findlay (who became editor of the West Lothian Courier in the 1960s-70s, whose journalism and family history informs the author's Shale Voices (Luath, 1999). He signed for Hibernian FC as a part-time provisional professional footballer, 1965-68. Trained at Moray House College, Edinburgh 1970-73 as a social worker, becoming a front-line manager in that profession until August 2007 when a SAC Writer's Bursary was awarded to write a critical anthology on the Poetry of Scottish Marxism - Lenin's Gramophone - and a third collection of poems on social workers - Dancing With Big Eunice. Joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the early 1980s when Michael Foot committed the Labour Party to supporting Mrs Thatcher's imperial adventure, the Falkland's War. Alistair holds Degrees from the Universities of Bradford, the OU, Edinburgh, Stirling on Social and Cultural History and Literature and Poetry. He believes in writing about subjects he knows something about, hence his other poetry collections, all published by Luath:
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