If it's OK with you, I thought I'd express my feelings in a little derby ditty
Fri 11 Apr 08 by Kevin Baldwin
(Poet's Corner: 1)
A Stone in the Horseshoe
We have an appointment
To be a fly in the ointment,
A banana on the pavement,
A horizontal rake.
A traffic light on red,
A bug in the bed,
The mould on the bread,
The cherry stone in the cake.
A pain in the neck,
A thorn in the side,
The tree on the track,
The mud on the slide.
A spoke in the wheel,
A chip in the mug,
A spanner in the works,
A stain on the rug.
A pin in the shirt,
A pebble in the shoe,
A wasp in the jam,
A fishbone in the stew.
A pin in the balloon,
A nail in the tyre,
A wet splat on the window,
A wet blanket on the fire.
The rain on the parade,
The snag in the zip,
The sugar in the fuel tank,
The p*** on the chips.
An open manhole,
An outstretched leg,
A bruise on the apple,
A rotten egg.
A hair in the gate,
A molehill on the lawn,
The knothole in the plank,
The blight on the corn.
A footprint in the wet cement,
A dark cloud in the sky,
The f**t in the spacesuit,
The dust in the eye.
The interference on the line,
The network going down,
The hacker on the website
(Error 404 page not found).
You could call this a poor ambition.
Me? I'd call it a mission.
______________________________________________________________
(Poets' Corner: 2)
With Messrs Roeder and Clark being charged by the FA following the Bristol City game, the name of Andy D'Urso is likely to linger malodorously around the place for a while longer yet.
Still, what's a couple more weeks? We've had to put up with his refereeing for over a decade now. Here's a little composition from The Second Coming about a game against Huddersfield in March 1997:
The referee, Andrew P. D'Urso,
Made everyone stand up and c'urso.
His display was so bad
That he should be glad
He didn't go home in a h'urso.
That match (which we won 2-0, incidentally) ended as a 9-a-side contest. In the first half, D'Urso booked six players within ten minutes for offences such as serious foul breath, ungentlemanly haircuts and deliberately head-butting the ball.
Red cards were inevitable ? and sure enough, there were four in the second half. Kevin Scott was dismissed for violent sneering, while Darren Eadie went for? actually I can't remember now. Being a big bruising thug, maybe, given D'Urso's poor eyesight.
His refereeing hasn't improved in the last 11 years.
But then, I suppose, neither has my doggerel.
_____________________________
(Poets' Corner: 3)
In mitigation, D'Urso is by no means the only person ever to fail to spot something obvious right in front of him.
In 1987, the writer A.N. Wilson was outraged that there was no memorial bust of 19th-century poet Matthew Arnold in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey.
He began a campaign to rectify this disgraceful omission, organising a petition and enlisting the help of other leading figures in the literary world.
The Dean of Westminster was soon inundated with angry letters? to which he calmly responded by pointing out that there had been a bust of Arnold in the Abbey since 1891.
Nothing to do with football, of course ? except that I noticed when we visited Watford last month that the action replays on the large screen were sponsored by a local law firm called Matthew Arnold and Baldwin.
That, I thought, is the only time those two writers will ever be mentioned in the same breath.
