And so the season of sport is upon us …
Tennis: the reigning champion is a non-entity, robot-trained
And fed on a diet of numbers,
15-love, 30-love, 40-love, Game!
With baseline serves fired from precision arms
And a slack-jawed face blanked by too many years of counting money -
Ah, the passion!
The crowd turns
To watch a sparrow landing
Or a cloud spill some rain.
Golf: hypnotised by the telly we have to watch dragging bores
Claw their way round,
Only the brightness of their jerseys
Preventing us from dropping off the precipice of our excitement.
Baseball: 3 a.m, the world asleep,
Commentators chew on names,
Inject excitement into fat men with fat bums,
Home runs,
Girly Rounders,
No one seems to care it’s dumb.
Rugby: the buggers run in the rain
In Wigan
In mud -
If you ask me it’s a bit of a dud.
Ice-hockey: frenetic pace,
Pucks hurtle invisibly around icy arenas,
Padded shoulders thump each other,
‘If only these sticks were guns!’ you can hear them think,
‘We’d finish you losers off completely!’
American football: indistinguishable from their military tactics,
Philistines advance in massed ranks,
Brute force against brute force -
Size is everything.
It’s a battlefield out there,
But foreign spectators just don’t care.
Athletics: lean women who can’t menstruate
Jostle with sprinters in lycra-clad pornography
As high-jumpers whose legs finish a mile away
Crowd out rowers with blank, square-jawed faces,
Skiers who can’t forgive Eddie,
Swimmers with elongated bodies
And squat dwarves pumping weights.
Boxing: two shits you wouldn’t want to meet in a bar
Obey rules -
And that’s the achievement.
Basketball: tall men, long arms,
Jumping high,
No charm.
Cricket: and the sound of willow hitting someone’s balls,
A Bouncer to take off his head,
Arguments with the umpire resulting in knives drawn
And a riot in the beer-bellied crowd.
Football: the national game,
Ruled by turkeys, played by drones,
Watched by cardboard boxes -
Force-fed on money, its gut’s exploded,
Sex-starved shenanigans by the ruling elite fill empty pages …
Ah! But wait -
Women’s football shows flair and imagination,
Not yet ruled by the corrupt or watched by Tracy’s boyfriend,
It leaps off the screen
With a scream that yells, ‘You better bloody well watch me!’
Wrestling: two Queens ham it up for the cameras,
Massaging each other’s shoulders afterwards.
It’s a melange of images,
Faintly disturbing -
I switch off the T.V.
