There are some nice touches along the way. Duffy evokes Achilles's time hidden on Scyros among women by picturing him "concealed in girls'/ sarongs", thus recalling that spectacularly ill-judged fashion moment of Beckham's. But to register the felicity of that hit is at the same time to see the shallowness of the poem as a whole. At bottom, there is nothing more to it than the mere circumstance that both Beckham and Achilles were vulnerable in their heel. If you attempt to press beyond that, and take seriously the apparent premise that modern sport — ruthlessly commercialised and thoroughly international — is in some way like warfare in the ancient world — tribal and saturated with religion — the poem just evaporates.

The point is not that Duffy's poems are bad, rather that they are winged for a short flight. Like a joke or a pun, once the penny has dropped, the thing is spent. So from the formal point of view and setting aside her ethical preferences and allegiances, her poetry has its deepest affinities with those modern literary forms which impose the most severely instrumental regime on language, such as advertising or tabloid headlines. 

In her collection of 1990, The Other Country, Duffy includes a monologue entitled "Poet for Our Times", in which the voice belongs to a tabloid journalist:

I write the headlines for a Daily
                                  Paper.
It's just a knack one's born with 
                      all-right-Squire.
You do not have to be an educator,
just bang the words down like they're
                              screaming Fire!

The secret of this art is "to grab attention with just one phrase", and the journalist concludes by complacently extolling his work as the "poems of the decade" and the "instant tits and bottom line of art". 

What is Duffy's relationship to this persona? In an interview given the following year, she spoke about exactly this question when she commented on her fondness for dramatic monologue: "You asked about giving voice for others. Clearly on one level, that is the case — but there is an initial, and often quite powerful, empathy or identification, which has to occur, does occur, before one would bother at all...The dramatic monologues I've written...are...closer to me as the writer than would appear." 

Just so.