One of the joys of doing this blog is that there is always something to fall back on. Some weeks a thought just won’t drop into place and inspire me but when that happens I can fall back on my archive of catalogued fanzine pieces and have a lazy week covering the staples; protest, humour, rants/creativity, features, copyright infringement, cartoons, caricatures, food, song, travel and of course…poetry.
You see poetry has always been there in fanzines, proof if ever there was need that football fans were not all “slum dwellers” as the Tories believed/believe. We covered the fact that the first poem appeared in the first fanzine with our last poetry blog (here https://footballfanzineculture.blog/2026/02/19/the-spontaneous-overflow-of-powerful-feelings-poetry-in-fanzines/) so no more explanation is needed, this week we will just dip at random into the archive and look at the good, the bad and the ugly of poetry in fanzines.
Grimsby, Quiche and the World Service
Yes, let’s start in Grimsby, that well known centre of poetic creativity. I mean Philip Larkin was from Hull and they’re practically the same place..Anyway, apparently they had eulogised Scott McGarvey in issue 2 of Mariner’s classic Sing When We’re Fishing but I’ve only got issue 4 so here’s poetry Corner from that edition. A FULL page of “inane ramblings” including one from a but probably not the Mrs/Miss/Ms Palister.
I’m thinking Cathy meant to put why rather than my but as they’s spent the night making quiche laden love maybe I’m wrong. It’s a majestic creation anyway. Paul trundled round the lower leagues and is now a goalkeeping coach for the Select Soccer Center in Pennsylvania1, whatever that is.
Phil Ball might also be a pseudonym, especially as he is talking about fiddling with his knob and making jokes about Terry Waite’s bike. I love it though, anyone who gets a mention of Peter Jones into “poetry” deserves some credit.
Larkin about
I suppose now I’ve insulted Hull (or was it Grimsby? – Ed) I need to redress the balance with some poetry from the home of Mr Larkin. The only problem is that in the eleven ‘ull fanzines I have there is not one word of verse! Let’s just assume that the fanzines realised what a bigoted racist Larkin was.
I went through them all and yes I only have issues of 4 of the 13 different ‘ull fanzines but the only thing vaguely related I could find was this from a Walsall fan in issue 30 of City Independent. It is from 2002 when Jan Molby (remember him!) signed Dean Keates on a free after his release from the Saddlers. Yes, Jan Molby was briefly manager of Hull City. For the record it was from April to October 2002, 17 games, 2 wins, 8 draws, 7 losses and a win % of 11.76% meaning there is more about his time at Hull on the Hull managers wiki than there is on his own one which fails to comment on the fact that he was even there.
It’s a great example of fanzine faint praise and not really “Poetry in motion” as the only thing our correspondent can bring up is him chasing down a long ball. It’s also an example of the shift of fanzines to the internet in the early 2000s. They’d contacted this guy from a forum and not a print fanzine…sigh. I will be quite happy to be corrected if anyone wants to send me some evidence but so far this means Hull are the only member of the fanzines without a poetic bone in their body spreadsheet.
Another Hotbed of Poetry
Let’s move a teeny bit further up the coast to Darlo and enter the mysterious but always entertaining world of Mission Impossible. Issue 15 from April 1991 contained this ode to “Prud The Good“, a joyful celebration of goalkeeper and “jug eared genius” Mark Prudhoe who had beaten the (club?) record for not conceding a goal. They could have left it at that but this is a fanzine so they put this in some sort of perspective by revealing that this wasn’t even half way to the world record which had just been broken in La Liga.
I have included a picture of Mark and his ears. This means that the record set over 7ish games is still 4 short of the record Darlo hold (with Coventry and Stevenage) for the most consecutive games without scoring, 11 in 1992-93. Mark’s record was 635 minutes which is just about half of the record for the UK set in 2008-9 by??? (answer below)
Keen readers will note that there is a comment about bard Tony Madelin being controversial. Elsewhere in issue 15 there is an almost double page spread excoriating the fanzine for publishing scurrilous poetry about Smudger Smith, well 2 letters anyway. Now fanzines were (sort of, almost) democratic and allowed the right to reply as long as it wasn’t racist or sexist and especially if it was written by the Vice Chairman of the club and/or Leigh Treymaine who is from Chorley. I must admit based on my extensive experience of lower league football from this period I would have had serious doubts about a centre back playing an “Alan Hansen game” in division 4 but Leigh played Semi Pro and can at least spell Kevan’s name correctly, something the vice chair doesn’t manage…
We are nothing if not thorough here at FFC towers and so we dug out issue 14 to see what the fuss was all about. I mean sure it’s not complimentary but it’s also pretty harmless, amusing and has structure I’m not sure as an officer of the club that I would have written to a fanzine about it spelling Kevan’s (sic) name wrong.
The Tenth Muse
Talking of long running records, Crystal Palace’s Eagle Eye issue 66 from 2005 (by now incorporating The Palace Echo) claims what must be the longest running “poem” ever in history, certainly for a fanzine anyway.
Thankfully issue 66 was an issue that celebrated 100 years of Palace with all sorts of great historical pieces, jokes, lists, sarcasm and cartoons and so didn’t have room for all 200 (TWO HUNDRED!!) verses of Dave Humphrey’s magnum opus written over a ten year period. There are 13 of them though with a great explainer on the background to each one.
What’s brilliant about this is that along with his doggerel and sticking to the “Sing a song of sixpence” rhyme he also reveals a Palace fanzine we hadn’t heard of before, Eagle Pie which had a circulation that “even reached double figures” at times. I also love the Steve Bruce bit, though the image of Brucie with pimples and his knob falling off is something I’ll need to bleach away somehow later on.
An Independent Fanzine
..for Norwich city is what The Citizen called itself. It will always bug me that they didn’t call it the CITYzen but there you go. Anyway, as early as issue 3 in November 1988 they had a poetry corner which, though slightly less creative than imagining things happening to Steve Bruce’s private parts still has its own place in this pantheon of poetry. A lovely little mouse/gerbil/rodent of some type accompanies the piece.
In reverse order the Guess Who? piece is pretty straightforward and easy to interpret. Our Robbie can only be Robert Fleck because they name him in the 2nd line. We can tell by this piece that they were wont to the odd mistake.
Top of the tree though is the Tribute to Kevin. Now based on the year this was published you’d have to assume it is about Kevin Drinkell, East Anglian superstar of the time. In 1987 he had rejected a move to Alex Ferguson’s fledgling ManU empire building exercise to further burnish his reputation and his 50 goals in 121 games meant that in 2002 fans voted Drinkell as an inaugural member of the Norwich city hall of fame. Mind you they did induct 100 players at the time including Kevin Reeves, Gary Megson and Ian Culverhouse..and yet..’King of the Travel‘, ‘Boss of the Bus‘ and ‘trips to just south of heaven‘ suggest that this might have also been a coach driver popular with the fans on the supporters buses. I guess we’ll never know.
Borrowed lines
Wrexham’s Sheeping Giant issue 27 from October 1995 decided not to produce their own poetry but they did borrow a rather lovely ditty from Not The 8502 after a draw with Bournemouth apparently watched by no one but commemorated by a bitter Cherries fan in verse anyway.
Why Rooster? Well, Kevin Russell earned the nickname Rooster due to the quiff hairstyle he donned early on in his career. The only picture I can find makes this look a bit harsh, even worse is on wiki where someone has put “ironically he would lose all his hair in his youth and was bald for much of his playing days”. Anyway, they didn’t like him at Bournemouth but he became a cult hero in Wales during his second spell there, the highlight of his 200 games being when he scored a 90th-minute goal to dump West Ham out of the cup at Upton Park in 1997.
Final Whistle
I read somewhere that “Poetry is the art of thinking” so it follows that in fanzines people were thinking about quiche related love. Poetry also raised the hackles of vice chairmen, it was used to register displeasure at former players returning or managers departing with the hope their knob drops off. These are all thoughts of a sort..
Slum dwellers? No, just normal people with a passion for the national sport who wanted to be heard, be it on the terraces in song or in verse and in print. Always creative, surprising and sometimes less than cultured but always worth reading.
You have been watching…
The UK’s longest goalkeeping run without conceding a goal is 1,311 minutes by Edwin Van Der Sar for Manchester United, still nowhere near the world record of 1,816 minutes by Mazaropi in Brazil in 1977-78.
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