Christmas at the Cathedral is an annual charity event held at Newcastle Cathedral featuring well-known Geordie talent to raise funds in aid of the Bobby Robson Foundation. I've been asked to write pieces for the event a number of times - usually football-based. Here are a couple of those commissioned pieces.
Stamp Your Feet, Son
by Scott Tyrrell
This was the first year the Bobby Robson Foundation became the event's chosen charity, so the organiser Ray Laidlaw commissioned me to write a football-themed poem that gave a nod to both Bobby Robson and the Christmas period.
On a cold Boxing day afternoon
a father and son shuffle along a row up the Gallowgate end
and take their place in the toon platoon
‘Stamp your feet son, stamp out the cold
you’ll soon forget you’re freezing when it kicks off’
A ten year old boy does as he’s told, feeling silly at first
but as his dad joins in and the grey-haired wrapped-up man
to his right shows willing
the rest of the row follows suit
and soon the giggles warm his cheeks
and he starts to feel part of it
He tightens his pristine black and white scarf
and sniffs the newness
Everything about this day is raw
and he can tell his dad is nervous
First match with his boy hoping it’s not the last
The war cries have already started
An undulating sonic wave
barely decipherable to the untrained ear
‘What they singing, Dad?’
‘It’s better you don’t know, yet son’
‘Mam said there’d be swearing’
‘What’s said in St. James stays in St. James’
Soon after the toss, white leather strikes white leather
and the battle and swearing begins
Expert advice spat from plump cheeks
filled with overpriced pie
is administered furiously
to some of the finest sportsmen in the world
and it in turn stocks up the vocabulary of a ten year old boy
(Which for the purposes of decency will be replaced by bleeps)
‘You should have gone to bleeping Specsavers, Ref!’
‘Bleeping Bleep! Who taught you to bleeping pass?
Stevie Bleeping Wonder?’
‘Yes, you bleeping beauty, make my bleeping year!’
‘You utter bleep’
‘Bleep off’
‘You bleeping bleeped up bleeper – that was a bleeping penalty
You bleeping bleep.’
‘Bleep bleep’
‘Aaaaawww for bleep’s sake’
The boy soaks in this vast lake of feeling
Waves of support and attack fired like arrows across a floodlit pitch
A battle raging on and over a patch of green
A tug of war on a ball
Tens of thousands willing and heaving
it between two nets.
The cold isn’t felt anymore, just every moment
slowed and precise and calibrated
No thought, just feeling
Thousands of hawks playing their own games of strategy
trying to telepathically tell twenty two men where to run
where to stand, who to mark
and if that doesn’t work, screaming it at them
The boy watches the man he came with
alive and on fire
As the light leaves the sky
It takes its place in his dad’s eyes
flashing passion, hope and belief
and every time they meet his son’s
there is something new
The boy is infected, converted
euphoric and magnetised for ninety minutes
and then…
As the crowd of black and white shuffle out the
Gallowgate end like a mob of impatient zebras
A glum boy stares at his feet
‘What’s up kidda?’
‘What’s up? We didn’t win.’
They stop by the corner of the Millburn stand and his dad looks up at
a bronze suited man resting on a ball with his hands in his pockets
looking south to the city
‘See him, see his face? Always makes me smile
He was a talented bloke
Played to win
Wanted to win
but that’s not what he’ll be remembered for
Not what he’ll be loved for
He was a trier
A decent, honest trier.
Can I ask you a question?’
‘Aye’ says his son
‘Were you cold during the game?’
‘Not really’
‘That’s passion, lad
That’s caring
That’s belief
‘blocks out the cold and everything else
and you could fill a thousand stadiums
with the belief he had
He didn’t always win
but he never stopped believing he could
And he never stopped believing in those who believed it too
And he definitely would have believed in you’
His son hides his smile in his scarf
His dad catches the edges of it
‘So do you fancy coming back here?
Give these over payed idiots another chance?’
‘Aye alright. Let’s get the Metro, Dad
I’m freezin’ now’
The two walk on
the bronze statue watches them disappear
into the hazy sodium light of the city
‘Stamp your feet, son
Stamp out the cold
You’ll soon forget you’re freezing
when you come back’.
The poem went down so well, I was asked to perform it (with my son) at the Sunday for Sammy concert in 2020.
These Boots
by Scott Tyrrell
In 2023 I was asked to pen another football poem for the event, to be performed by the great North East actress Charlie Hardwick (Billy Elliot, Our Friends in the North, Emmerdale). The poem was written with the recent wins by the Lionesses in mind. Massive thanks to fellow poet Kate Fox for her perspective.
Footie boots, white and sleek as a sportscar
- a Christmas present from Dad.
Made of unyielding leather that clung
to ankles like a mountaineer.
The studs were hooves clopping on the kitchen floor tiles
much to the harsh glare of Mam.
But on grass, they were crocodile’s teeth.
These boots ate every patch of green.
They’d come home with delicious mud stuck to their teeth.
They punched, slid, sprinted and kept gravity
away from every ball.
They touched with the lightness of a balloon,
they hammered like an anvil.
They aimed countless shots towards the corners of crossbeams and chalk posts.
There were hits, misses, near misses and the occasional bathroom window
but they kicked on.
They skipped and flew with each triumph.
They dragged like a wrecking ball with every defeat.
These boots were loved
like an artist’s brush,
or a boxers’ gloves,
or a pastor’s prayerbook.
And on the day their owner went for school trials
they were polished and buffed
and prayed over and kissed
and laced up like a vestment.
And when it was all over,
when the day had ended in cruel laughter,
they weighed of iron.
They were dragged away from the pitch as if Hell had them on a hook,
and once they were home their owner ripped them from her feet
and flung them to the corner of the yard and wept.
Her Dad boxed them up and hid them away in a cupboard
And there they stayed, hard mud cementing around their teeth.
A pair of magnificent beasts caged in their prime.
Once favourite children locked up like traitors.
Until…
the woman that was the girl blew dust off the box,
picked at the fossilised soil with a pen knife,
spat and polished the stains away,
and handed them to her daughter.
‘Yours now, Bobbie.’
White leather now clings to different, yet familiar ankles.
And once again the crocodiles get to eat.
But this time the sprints, the slides, the touches
are more assured, more adept,
less in need of luck or acceptance.
This girl is in a league of her own now,
forged by lionesses with boots like hers.
Unyielding boots that dug in with the will
of a stubborn lass impatient to claim her own turf.
Bobbie now dances around that turf with the best of them.
She’s good and her mother knows it.
One day she’s going to play while the world holds its breath.
Until then she’ll practice in her mother’s boots
and together they’ll stand on the terraces and watch the pros.
They’ll wave their black and white scarves.
They’ll clap at good sportsmanship.
They’ll hurl abuse at the ref.
And afterwards they’ll nod to the bronze statue
at the Gallowgate end of the stadium
And her mother will tell her
there’ll be another Bobbie there one day
with a great set of boots because these boots
were made for kicking
And that’s just what they’ll do.
And one of these days these boots
are going to win a world cup too.