Ian McMillan

And on the pitch, you see artistry, farce, you see tragedy, you see some people working hard, you see some people not working hard.

Some people are obviously comedians in the dressing room.

It's the same with poetry.

Some words are proper team players.

Some words aren't.

They'll just stand out there and

maybe not do enough work and have to be thrown out.

There are endless links between poetry and football.

No, I don't think it does.

I think I've changed my mind over the years.

You know, when I was a young man, people would turn up to my workshop that I was running and they had poems that rhymed.

And to my eternal shame, I would say, look, go away and make it not rhyme.

And then, as I've got older, I've realised the absolute power of rhyme.

And now, if those people had come back again, I'd celebrate their rhyming.

And what I do is I try and make people rhyme in a different way.

You've got a ten-line poem, rhyme the first line with the last line, the second line with the ninth line, and so on.

So the middle two lines rhyme, and it's like a pebble being thrown into a pond and you get a ripple effect.

And the way that rhyme can actually help you to write the poems so that a rhyme in a line will suggest the next line that you wouldn't actually have thought of.

So poems don't have to rhyme, and I love non-rhyming poems, but I do love rhyming poems as well.

Well, at Hope Kayode, he scored against Chelsea.