Sitting on the Kop at Sheffield Wednesday last week, one of the guys who I sit near to tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘read your blog the other day-too much religion, not enough football’. I couldn’t agree more my friend, so here it is…
I’ve been an on/off follower of the Owls all my life: when my mother went into a care home, I found a letter I wrote to her when she was in hospital having given birth to my younger brother (who also comes to the match with me) 45 years ago. I was ten, and it reads ‘I hope he’s a Wednesdayite!’ In the early 90s, my son wanted to go to the football regularly, and my brother used to take him. One fateful night, he couldn’t make it so I was drafted in to accompany the boy to the Wednesday playing Bolton Wanderers. We won 4-1, I was hooked again, and I’ve missed very few home games since.
It was Bill Shankly who was reported to have said (mistakenly actually) that ‘football isn’t a matter of life or death, it’s much more important than that’. What is it that makes, ordinarily sane and quite sensible, people follow this fickle game? True, there is a sense of comradeship, of sharing high emotion with like-minded people. There is the ‘Coronation Street’ factor: you keep going Saturday by Saturday because, if you miss and episode, you don’t know what’s happening. There’s the tradition: my grandfather and father were both Wednesdayites, and so, like the passing on of a baptismal shawl, we keep the tradition going today. And there’s the ecstasy: yes it’s true that 99% of football is disappointment (yes, even for Manchester United fans), but the 1% is pure living and joy: an excitement with which you can live for days, or even weeks. In the end, we also know that we rarely experience the height of human physical achievement at its most balletic as when David Hirst escaped the off-side trap, slipped past two defenders and slotted a pin-perfect shot into the bottom right hand corner. Sublime!
Make no mistake, we football fans are aware of the downside: we know how sad we look to others who simply can’t understand why our emotional life is ruled by whether our team wins or loses. We know that we have been corralled into that section of the public psyche marked ‘hooligan’, ‘cultureless moron’ and ‘foul mouthed idiot’, but we simply don’t care, for this collective foolishness is reserved for the stadium and we return to being the sensible, upright members of society we really are once we leave the ground. And when we count up what the tickets for the game, plus two for the kids, the hamburger, tea and programme have actually cost us, we wince a little and then shrug, knowing that in those two 45 minute halves of football we have experienced more human emotion in one week than most people manage in a year.
And then there’s ‘the crack’: there isn’t a man or woman in the ground who doesn’t believe they would be a better tactician than the present manager: substitutions; formations; set-pieces and player assessments all reverberate around the ground before, during and after the match: the intellectual input of the crowd. And, you will rarely hear anything as side-splittingly funny as the casual comments of the people sitting by you. Classic cases in my memory are when the trumpeter in our Kop band imitated an ambulance siren as the St John Ambulance men waggled on to the pitch with a stretcher: the time when Ravenelli (the ‘white feather) missed a sitter and the guy behind shouted ‘Nar then Ravenelli, tha’t a disgrace to all white-haired people’ or, funniest of all, at half time, when reading our programmes, David Hirst was knocking up and struck the ball onto the Kop, knocking a mobile ‘phone four rows out of someone’s hands. The same guy said ‘I knew they were mobile ‘phones, but I didn’t know they were that ****** mobile!’
And then there’s the derbies! My home town of Sheffield is divided into two halves: one blue and white (us!) and the other red and white (them). When we play each other, the ground seethes with partisan dislike and venom, and the winner gets ‘bragging rights’ until the next time. Then, after the passion, the blood and the spit, we all return quietly to work in our offices and factories, next door to the guy in red and white. It’s tribal but its fun, and it means a lot.
Last year, when he was a year old, I took my grandson to his first match. He was wearing the mini kit bought for him by his uncles, and he sat mesmerised throughout a chilly and boring encounter. It all starts again…












Well those nasty Roman Catholics have been at it again I see. Sneakily offering to take on board, re-train and re-ordain, some of our nice Anglican clergy. They’re going to jump ship in their thousands, the Church of England will be brought to its knees, all our churches will return to Catholic safe hands and Christendom as we know it will cease to exist. We’ll all be genuflecting in the streets and it will all become like those awful foreign countries with their tacky plastic madonnas and disgusting relics-nice to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.



In the parlance of my native Sheffield: ‘I can’t get my breath!’ For the past twenty or so years, the Church, amongst other major institutions, has been working overtime to introduce measures into our corporate life that will safeguard young children and vulnerable adults. We have been largely successful in this, and, I think, can be justifiably gratified that most church communities now have a Policy for child protection and the national Church itself has highly developed methods for filtering out potential priests and employees who might misuse their position. Mindful of the immense amount of distress and suffering the Irish Roman Catholic Church has uncovered in relation to this issue, our present day arrangements to safeguard victims are not before time and are to be deeply welcomed.
At a recent meeting of the Bishops, the Archbishop of Canterbury broke off from his comments on worldwide Anglican affairs to say that, although it was completely off the subject, we should all try and get to see ‘The Mysteries’ at the Garrick Theatre. Not amongst those who would pass up any suggestion from Rowan, and finding ourselves in London at the Royal Foundation of St Katherine for our annual residential Lincoln Senior Staff meeting, off we went to witness this remarkable production.
I will soon be off on holiday and this year we have decided to embark upon a long cherished idea for an adventure: we’re off to France, the Somme to be precise, to have a nosy around the First World War sites. We had a brief glimpse as a family some years ago when we spent a night there on route to Spain. I remember with both delight and chagrin my two sons running around the still extant trenches at the Newfoundlanders’ memorial, pretending to shoot each other and die quite dramatically. I was delighted, because my sons were using their imagination to play around a theme that they knew little about-only the memories of X Box ’shoot ‘em ups’. I felt chagrin, because I ruminated that neither of those two young boys would have been able to run around in such a way had not my own grandfather survived every major campaign of that ghastly war (he was in the Royal Engineers): sometime after his death and a good while before the birth of my sons, I took part in our school play when we enacted ‘Oh What A Lovely War’. The cutting and satirical insights of that play have stayed with me always, and I remain distrustful of believing that every war that we are enagaged in is a righteous one. I am proud of my father’s involvement, as one of the first Commandos, in bringing down the great evil of Nazi fascism. I have less reason to believe that other conflicts that we have been involved in had such a moral authority.