Friday, 3 October 2008
A debt paid to Stokie
To Old Stokie, that is, commenting as OS, this panegyric entitled...
The Old Nostalgia Ground
Do you remember…
Yes I remember…
Waddington, Matthews, Viollett and Banks,
Great rivals to Revie and Busby and Shanks,
The Victoria Ground and the Butler Street Stand,
And Mudie and Vernon, McIlroy and… and…?
But shouldn’t Bob Stokoe have managed the City?
Not Eastham and Asprey, and more is the pity
It wasn’t Lord Greystoke, him of the apes,
Or Johnny Weissmuller, or even Geoff Capes!
Do you remember…
Yes I remember…
Mahoney and Pejic and Shilton and Heath
A rocklike defence and a strike force with teeth,
(Those elderly wingers, those tentative ventures
Along either touchline, less teeth and more dentures),
And Conroy and Greenhoff and Dobing and Dodd,
When Hudson was Jesus and Greenhoff was God,
Denis Smith, Alan Bloor, Mark Stein and Garth Crooks,
Selected for speed, for his goals and his looks.
It was all hokey-cokey,
It was quite okey-dokey,
League Cup and Old Stokie.
Do you remember…
Yes I remember…
The days before sub-primes and hedge funds and lotteries,
When employment in China meant work in The Potteries,
When men were all hairy and smoky and stank,
When a Staffordshire woman stood firm as a tank,
When food was plain food, not guacamole or coulis,
Which you can’t properly rhyme in English with Pulis!
When you’d hop on a bus and get change from a penny!
And a laugh was not Brand but Bob Hope or Jack Benny!
When gay meant just jolly, when busted was broke!
When all was as well as it could be in Stoke!
When blokes were pure bloky and life okey-dokey!
When time was still time, and Stoke was Old Stokie!
Cheers, OS.
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6 comments:
That is not too bad for a Man U fan. Applause!
I hope you're happy to be published without a second thought given to your copyrights: OS is a picaresque who will be cut and pasting that to the Editor of The Oatcake without so much as a backward glance.
What is copyright worth in Stoke? Oatcake is welcome to it. He should put it down to Anon perhaps. I've always had a secret hankering to be Anon.
True poetry is to be found in a recent Man U adaptation of a West Ham song. It goes
Tune: Can't Take My Eyes Off You
Words:
Ohhhhhh Owen Hargreaves,
You are the love of my life
Oh Owen Hargreaves
I’d let you shag my wife
Oh Owen Hargreaves
I want curly hair too”
Pure Boys' Own stuff.
George, lovely to see Roy Vernon with the panegyrized. Roy was one of several characters who could be found a couple of evenings a week at Blackburn dogs. We often chewed the fat and supped a pot or two after an evening's racing. No side to him. Great bloke.
The Atherton brothers started the business, the oldest independent stadium in Britain, with a bag of gold fillings brought back from the German trenches. Or so the story goes.
Sadly the track's no more; in it's place is a redbrick superstore with a massive car park and a cut-price filling station.
Yes I remember…and more.
*Thank you, George.
(*Doffs flat cap and sidles away with a smug grin.)
NB, I will not put it on The Oatcake. There are too many BNP voters on there to even consider them worthy of this work. Besides, Garth Crooks is an anathema to some of them. He dares not to support Stoke when he's on the telly. :)
Very pleased to see a mention of the one and only Geoff Capes!
Check him out in this video we made recently of him throwing tradesmen as far as he can:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWP3GjsYM68
Legend.
Indeed a frightening sight, Rob.
Mr Capes would do a very good Santa Claus. He could just throw his gifts down the chimney.
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