I thought this was hilarious when I first read it. I'd recommend reading it, even if it might look a bit long.
The Times Saturday 29th November 2003
Football beckons terrace wits to 'come and have a go if you think you're bardenough'
GILES SMITH
THIS week Barclaycard, which sponsors the Premiership, announced a competition to discover and nurture a "poet of the terraces". The
winner, having demonstrated "an ability to create witty, insightful, rousing and original chants that reflect the pride and passion of the game", will be anointed Chants Laureate for the 2004 05 season and paid a stipend of Pounds 10,000 to continue his or her work. It's a long overdue development and good news for all of us who care about poetic expression, both in the footballing arena and more widely. One can only warmly second the words of Andrew Motion, the chair of the competition's judging panel, who, as the nation's Poet Laureate, knows as well as anyone alive what it's like to feel a poem coming on, whether on the occasion of a late winner away to Aston Villa or the birthday of a royal corgi.
Football chants, Motion pointed out, are a kind of "folk poetry". "One way people discover poetry is often to do with chanting in the
playground," he explained. "If that element ever goes out of poetry, the reader feels it is losing touch with something essential." Nic
Gault, Barclaycard's sponsorship director, also spoke an important truth when he said that football chants are "a modern-day art form".
So who is likely to be in the running for the honour and responsibility that goes with this new post? It is hard to believe the following poets won't be there or thereabouts when the shortlist is announced.
BARRY GRIM
A chanting veteran and one of the few published UK versifiers to have run with West Ham United's Inter City Firm, Grim first came to
notice as long ago as 1979 when he issued the terse but darkly provocative "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough". He
then cemented his legend with a verse composed for goal-kick occasions, a piece which, ambitiously, began not with a word but with
a sound -a tremulous, protracted "ooooeeer" -gradually building to terminate in the emphatic cry, "You're s***, aaaaaaaah". It was
described by Poetry Quarterly at the time as "a masterpiece of distraction and belittlement".
Some critics felt that Grim's work grew slightly more detached with the advent of all-seat stadiums, but others credit that shift in
perspective with the loftier overview which eventually informed the classic, and recognisably Grim, "You're s*** and you know you are"
(1992). But there is a biting satirical darkness within Grim's compositions, too, a strain caught nowhere more audibly than in the mocking and timely bitterness of his 1994 work, "She fel'oova".
DAVE "SHAGGER" HUGHES
The Crewe-based Hughes was originally one of the lesser lights of the fabled Gresty Road chanters' circle and seemed destined to
languish in obscurity until he happened upon the searchingly interrogative masterpiece that made his name "Who the f****** hell
are you?" (1982). It was a theme Hughes returned to again in 1999 in "Who are ya?" But the idea didn't find its definitively compact form of expression until 2001, in a chant designed for use at the announcement over the Tannoy of substitutions: the breathtakingly
stark, blisteringly existential "Who?" Hughes is still hard at work today and cites among his inspirations W. H. Auden, the Tennyson of In Memoriam, and Graham Poll. But mostly Graham Poll.
GARRY TREADWELL
Sponsored by the National Lottery in 1998 to produce something that would speak to as much of Britain as possible, Treadwell came up with the now immortal, "Stand up if you hate Man U". There can be no other piece of poetry (or of prose either, for that matter) written in the 20th century that has so successfully brought the nation together, both in word and deed, and if Treadwell had written nothing else, this work would still stand as a powerful argument for the communally bonding power of verse. That he went on to compose the only extant piece we have with which to mark the receiving of medical attention by a player -"Let him die, let him die, let him die" (1999) -only confirms Treadwell's standing as a leading contender for any Chants Laureateship, now or in future.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
It is well-known that, in his earlier life as an advertising copywriter, the Booker Prizewinning author of Midnight's Children created the cream cake slogan, "Naughty but nice". What is less well-documented is that, as a dedicated home and away Tottenham Hotspur fan during the 1980s and 1990s, Rushdie was single handedly responsible for forcing into circulation the now standard cry of the travelling supporter, "Sh***y ground, sh***y ground, sh***y ground". However, when it comes to the Barclaycard award for 2004-05, the fact
that he hasn't done anything since may count against him in the judges' eyes.
DEAN TOBIN
Younger readers will know Tobin primarily as the author of the seminal "Oh Andy Cole is a f****** a*******" (1999). Older heads,
however, will appreciate that he is, above all, the author of perhaps the greatest chant we have. Lucid, rounded, the very model of a
compressed narrative, it opens with a simple, almost staccato, five-word, five-syllable question: "Who ate all the pies?" Then, with
a powerful sense of gathering urgency, the same question comes again: "Who ate all the pies?"
At this point, the reader, or chanter, could reasonably assume he was party to nothing more than a doomed floundering for
enlightenment. But that feeling is banished in the next line, as the tone abruptly switches to one of dawning realisation accompanied by
amazed incredulity: "You fat bastard! You fat bastard!" At which point, the momentum of the verse forces us onwards and round the corner to the blazing revelation of the final line: "You ate all the pies!" Here, surely, in a simple quatrain, is the very essence of what Motion means by "folk poetry". And the piece is at the same time a persuasive counter-proof to offer to those who feel that poetry is all very well but that it fails to answer any of the questions that people are asking in their lives.
JEAN "NAN" PROSSER
When feminist critics brand football chantwork as an exclusively male preserve, they neglect the work of Mansfield Town's Nan Prosser, now 86. Eschewing latter-day fripperies, such as a tune and getting other people to join in, Prosser persists instead with a freeform reworking of traditional themes, almost always performed solo and from under a clear plastic rain hood. Of her many familiar pieces, "What's the matter with you, ref? You blind or something?" (1953) is perhaps the best-known. Prosser's is not the most accessible body of work among those of our contemporary chanteurs, yet hers is undeniably an important lone voice in the 21st-century footballing canon, shrill and utterly inconsolable.
ODDS: Tobin 2-11 favourite; Grim 5-1; Treadwell, Hughes, Rushdie
14-1; Prosser 25-1.
