Not Just A Game: Sporting Poems by Andy Croft, Sue Dymoke

No poetry anthology can ever aim or claim to be complete but Not Just a Game… does seem to be a collection of almost everything… it bursts with the kind of passion and excitement more usually associated with a sports event than poems… Sport is often suggested as a way in to reading for the resistant, this book will more than earn its place on the library shelf. Definitely a winner.

School Librarian

…an attractively varied selection. Any book that has space for John Arlott, cricket commentator, and Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, dub poet; for Allan Ahlberg, of Please Mrs Butler fame, and Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, has something to make it worth buying. First, it’s the knowledge of two industrious editors, and their capacity for research. And second, the poems are about more than sport. What, indeed, do they know of sport who only sport know? … Never before, it’s a safe bet, have Crewe Alexandria and Anderlecht been mentioned in the same stanza.

...John Betjeman's legendary sportspeople include, of course, Joan Hunter Dunn ("The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy"), along with the rowers in "Henley Regatta 1902", with its lovely lines about the barrels running dry amid the flowering heart of England's willow-cooled July. But myth-making does not require Edwardians and a Thames-side location. Neil Rollinson writes in "The Semis":

"After a skinful of beer you become one
with the darts, bright as a monk fishing at dawn"

Finding such a poem adjacent to Louis MacNeice's "The Cyclist" is one of the many pleasures of Not Just a Game, in which unevenness is redeemed by celebration.

Nicolas Clee

From the post-Edwardian elegance of John Arlott, the cricket commentator (Cricket at Worcester, 1938) to Jean Binta Breeze "on cricket, sex and house­work", Not Just a Game is full of delights. I enjoyed Neil Rollinson's thoughts on fielding in the deep, well away from all those manic slip fielders leaping about and sledging the poor batsman.

The short boxing section is strong because the poems are by Vernon Scannell and George Jowett, who are boxers. John Betjeman is here, weak from Joan Hunter Dunn's loveliness on the tennis court and in the car park afterwards. Never has the roof of a car seemed so erotic. But there are surprises too: Ted Hughes, for example, watching football at Slack, and George Szirtes's fine poem about watching Preston North End in Tom Finney's last season. Anyone who still believes that sport and politics don't mix should read Kit Wright's bitter attack on the cricketers who enjoyed South African hospitality during the apartheid era. This book should be in every school where there are sports fans.