Ian McMillan

That's what excites me.

To be honest, I found it hard.

I like being given...

commissions if you like where people asked me to write something very specific and this was but I found that I was getting stuck partly because the subject is so vast and then you have to trust your mind you have to trust your brain and then I thought well because it's for the radio this is before I start writing it because it's for the radio I want it to rhyme because rhyme is great on radio and rhyme

Somebody might be doing something else and they hear the rhyme.

I think it has to have rhythm because for me, football is all about rhythm and poetry is about rhythm.

And so then I just thought of the first couple of lines.

The whistle blows and the game begins and the words begin and the song.

And those four lines just popped in to my head.

So I wrote them down and do a thing that I always do.

which is I write them down in my notebook and then I put them away and I forget them and I sleep on it.

And somehow this kind of magic alchemy happens where the poem doesn't write itself because you were writing it, but the poem is forming itself in your mind, often in places that haven't got language in, in kind of impressions and images.

And then I got up the next morning and

began to write it down.

That was the first draft, but then I wanted within it a quieter voice that was maybe whispering in my ear at the same time that the more strident, rhythmic and rhyming voice was perhaps performing the poem.

Then something's whispering in me a gentler voice.

I wrote it in the poem in italics.

And then again, left it, then went back to it.

And when you go back to it the next time, you go, who wrote this?

What amateur?