Des Lynam reads Chris’s football poem and metal detecting takes hold
Chris’s newest enthusiasm was metal detecting, sparked by the stories of people finding valuable objects in fields. He had not found much yet, but a listener with a detector-owning grandfather made the prospect of forming a dedicated detecting friendship circle sound more plausible than ever.
The conversation also took in pet-security questions, after the team disagreed over whether an answer should be a pet’s name or the animal itself. Chris’s certainty that everybody naturally understood his own system did not survive much contact with the others.
For 24 Years at the Tap End, Chris found the only diary he had kept as a child and revealed a poem written after his football team lost. He had been so upset by the defeat that he went upstairs and wrote The Winning Goal, an unexpectedly sincere record of the occasion.
The poem’s discovery led to the programme’s centrepiece: Des Lynam reading it with the seriousness of a famous football broadcast. The combination of Chris’s childhood disappointment, grand wording and the veteran presenter’s delivery made the old diary entry feel like an improbable sporting classic.
The day moved easily between very small personal obsessions, from fields and security answers to a school match many years earlier. Chris’s poem, however, was the moment everyone returned to, because he had somehow preserved both the emotion and the spelling mistakes for the show to enjoy.
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