David Beckham's Achilles injury commemorated by Poet Laureate

A new poem by Carol Ann Duffy immortalises David Beckham's Achilles injury in a poem that compares the former England captain to the classical warrior.

Beckham's injury has been immortalised in poetry Photo: GETTY IMAGES

In Achilles, tributes to Beckham's ability with a football are mixed with references to the classical myth in which the warrior is let down by his one weakness – his heel – while fighting at Troy.
Duffy told the BBC: "He (Beckham) is almost a mythical figure himself, in popular culture.
"The most tragic image was him being unable to walk and crying on the side of the pitch.
"It's fascinating that the injury takes its name from Achilles ... The whole point of Greek myths is the combination of triumph and tragedy that we follow in them."
In the myth Achilles, the greatest of warriors, was dipped in the River Styx to make him invulnerable, but he was held by the ankle, making it the only chink in his armour.
The poem, the latest offering from the Poet Laureate, follows her poem on the MPs' expenses scandal and a tribute to the men who fought in the Great War, following the deaths of the last two surviving British soldiers.
Achilles
Myth's river – where his mother
dipped him, fished him, a
slippery golden boy flowed on,
his name on its lips.
Without him, it was prophesied,
they would not take Troy.
Women hid him, concealed him
in girls' sarongs; days of
sweetmeats, spices, silver songs ...
But when Odysseus came, with an
athlete's build, a sword and a shield,
he followed him to the battlefield,
the crowd's roar,
And it was sport, not war,
his charmed foot on the ball ...
But then his heel, his heel, his heel ...