It’s a whole new ball game: Jackie Kay will read an anti-racism poem on the pitch before a match between Sheffield United and Portsmouth on Monday night.

The initiative was the idea of Sue Beeley, head of community at Sheffield United, and Su Walker from Sheffield’s Off the Shelf literature festival.

Kay’s poem is about Arthur Wharton, the first professional black footballer to play in the Football League. She said: “He was born in Ghana; his father was half-Scottish and half-Grenadian. He came to England in 1882 and by 1894 was playing for Sheffield United. He died in 1930. Wharton was my talisman. I imagined him coming back from the dead and hearing the news. I imagined his reaction to the monkey chanting. Just thinking about him made me think about the extra time on racism's clock; how racism is society's own goal. Shaming.”

You can read Kay’s poem, Here’s My Pitch, in this Guardian report here. The poem will also be painted on the Bramall Lane stadium’s walls, another Off The Shelf initiative that has seen, as Kay says, work by Andrew Motion, Jarvis Cocker, Benjamin Zephaniah and Roger McGough adorning various parts of Sheffield.