Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, By WB Yeats
Had I the heavens embroidered cloths
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I , being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Well I assume we are all familiar with Yeats obsession with Maud Gonne and all the rest of it but though he never got the girl he left us his imperishable words. The ‘big six’ who recently attempted to tread (trample would be more like it) on the dreams of English football fans would have done well to brush up on Yeats poetry first. Sadly it is probably fair to say that mystical Irish poets are not to the fore in the thoughts of the Wall st vulture capitalists who saw the holy game of football as no more than another opportunity to make billions off the labours of others. The capitalists and right wing free marketeers like to lecture us on open competition and hard work but their proposal for the new ESL was modelled on American Football where there is no competition and no failure. The price for joining this utopian dystopia was never fleshed out but suffice to say it would be the end of football as we know it. As ever the charlatans in Westminster came out all indignant on the side of the fans once the cat was out of the bag but the truth is they were fully informed of the project for the last year and more but had no objection whatever. (Remember Johnson had two articles ready to publish after the brexit vote, one to say why the people were right to vote yes and one for the opposite.) Meanwhile the lifelong fans who thought they were the heart and soul of the club have received the mother of all eye openers and now know exactly what the owners think about them. The more cynical might say that the fans were always naive to believe in all that ‘you’ll never walk alone stuff’ etc and it’s true that there is indeed a surreal quality to the relationship between the fan and the player given one is a multimillionaire and the other a relative pauper but that would be to ignore the bridge which the beautiful game rebuilds every time the ball is kicked off. Naturally the lads on sky and by sport are leading the outrage to the coup attempt but it’s high time someone said that these boys are hardly disinterested observers. They are paid many millions for their services and are also living in a parallel universe from those who they say they represent, ie the fans. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

Yeats left Ireland and lived out his last years in France but his body was exhumed and reburied in Sligo under the shadow of Benbulbin in 1939 I think and the words on his gravestone would be good advice for anyone upset by the antics of the in crowd:
‘Cast a cold eye on life, on death,
Horseman pass by’.