How one fan turned Ipswich's promotion season into poetry

A season written in real time

The idea began simply enough: Jeyes, an Ipswich Town supporter and advertising copywriter, has written poetry since childhood, and believes almost any subject can be turned into verse. Football, he decided, would be the test.

"The idea of doing football match reports as poems was simply trying to combine the things I love – Ipswich Town FC and writing irreverent (some might say irrelevant) poems," he explains. "So I set myself the challenge of writing a match report poem for every Ipswich league game for the 2025/26 season."

That meant 46 poems for 46 league fixtures, published week by week on the blogs section of TWTD.co.uk, an independent Ipswich Town fan website, before Jeyes began performing them on YouTube, TikTok, X and Instagram.

Crucially, each poem was written in real time, without any idea of how the season would end. "The poems (and their intros) are presented in order, as they and the matches happened," Jeyes says. "So with that, bear in mind I had no idea where the season was leading as I wrote them. They therefore create a sort-of-accurate story arc, where none of us knew what the ending would be."

Capturing a season of highs

That uncertainty is part of what makes the collection – now published as a book titled Between The Lines: The Irreverent Poetry of Ipswich Town – feel like lived experience rather than a tidy retrospective. It charts Town's promotion back to the Premier League and, as Jeyes puts it, the fact they "not only made it back to the Premier League, but also, some would say more importantly, did the double over Norwich. I very much enjoyed writing those ones."

One of those Norwich fixtures produced a poem called "Rocks", written after Ipswich won 2-0 away at Norwich on 11 April 2026:

Days like this are heaven-sent. A feast for the eyeballs, against your rivals. Dealing with high balls. You don't need prayer mats, black cats or bibles. Just blocks. Rolled up sleeves, O'Shea and Greaves. Rocks.

It is a flavour of the style that runs through the book: short, punchy, and rooted firmly in the specifics of each match.

The final whistle, and then some

The book runs to 122 pages and features 52 poems in total. Of these, 48 cover Town's league campaign – accounting for a match at Blackburn that was abandoned due to a waterlogged pitch, which Jeyes covered with a poem for both the original fixture and its replay, and another match that inspired two poems rather than one.

The remaining four are bonus poems marking the FA Cup Final, the Championship Play-off Final, the Champions League Final, and the departure of manager Kieran McKenna.

That final poem was not part of the original plan. "And then, of course, we had a plot twist right at the end. Well actually, past the end, when we thought the story was over," Jeyes says. "There's a poem for Kieran McKenna too. Get the tissues ready."

The bottom line

What began as a personal challenge to prove that any subject could be turned into a poem has become something more lasting: a week-by-week account of one of Ipswich Town's most memorable seasons, told through the eyes – and rhymes – of a fan who did not know how the story would end until he had written every last verse.

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