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Latest score: Liverpool 20, Manchester United 10

By D Gibson.

A year ago Paul Beasley-Murray included the following sentences in a short article in Ministry Today:

“I was reminded of a visit I had paid a month or so ago to the graveyard attached to St Brelade's Church, Jersey. It had been a beautiful sunny day, and, as I wandered around, it becam,e clear that most of the recent graves lacked any Christian hope, even although they were to be found in a church grave-yard.”

Recently I took a couple of hours and surveyed the headstones in the main cemetery in East Belfast. This cemetery serves a mainly urban population, largely but not exclusively Protestant, and with a wide socio-economic range. I looked at well over three thousand headstones, almost all of which were less than ten years old. One group of inscriptions and symbols on these headstones forms the foundation of the following essay.

We are all aware of the high profile of sport in contemporary society. To minister in this context we must appreciate just how important sport is for many people. One indication of the place held by sport in an individual’s life is when that person or his relatives decide to include sporting emblems or inscriptions on the headstone of his grave. There could be no more stark expression of the importance of sport to a person than having his headstone permanently engraved with the name of his favourite football team. By the way, if my use of male pronouns seems insensitive, with one possible exception, all headstones with sporting symbols were on the graves of men.

Eighty one (c.2%) headstones had some sort of sporting motif or inscription. This did not include such things as a football on the grave of a child, which could have been representative of a child’s plaything rather than a sporting symbol; a saloon car, which could have been on the grave of a motor mechanic; or a dog that was obviously not a racing dog.

The age range was very wide, from young children to the people in their eighties, and the range of sports covered was as follows (the number of occurrences is in brackets, some headstones had more than one sport represented):

Football (49), Horse racing (11 + 3 with images of horses that may not be racing horses), Dog racing (6), Fishing (4 - one had the legend, ‘Gone fishin’’), Motor cycling (3), Bowls (2), Pigeon fancying (2), Budgerigars (1, possibly a woman, two people are named), Wildfowling (1), Car racing (1), Boxing (1).

The football teams represented were:

Liverpool (20), Manchester United (10), Glentoran (the local, East Belfast, Irish League team) (5), Glasgow Rangers (5), Glasgow Celtic (2), Manchester City (2), Chelsea (1), Nottingham Forest (1), Newcastle United (1) Arsenal (1), No club (1).

Some observations and comments

More than half the sporting symbols were football related and only one of these was not related to a specific club. Ironically this single generic symbol was on the grave of a man whose funeral I conducted around three years ago. The man had been a well respected Irish League player with a long and distinguished career in local football. Although he had spent most of his career playing for and later coaching at one club, his family chose a generic symbol rather than a club badge.

Because of the huge bias towards football, most of my comments below relate to this sport, but many would apply equally well to other sports.

What we inscribe on a headstone expresses what we want to remember about the deceased. Phrases such as ‘A loving mother’; ‘Greatly missed brother’ or ‘We will never forget’ speak of close relationships within families and groups of friends. Inscriptions also indicate how we believe the deceased saw himself, how he wanted to be identified as a person, what was really important to him. Can it really be that so many people actually want to be remembered, first and foremost, as the supporter of a football club? Let us examine why this might actually be the case.

First, while a fairly wide range of sports was represented, some were noticeable by their absence. Rugby, hockey, tennis, golf, cricket and Gaelic games all have significant followings in the Province, but were unrepresented. The absence of Gaelic games can be explained by East Belfast’s largely Protestant population but, for the others, my suspicion is that there may be a correlation with socioeconomic status. People from higher economic bands are more likely to follow the sports that are unrepresented, while lower income groups are likely to follow those that are represented. I suspect that this reflects the different place that sport holds in the lives of members of the different income groups. For members of lower income groups, sport seems to have a much more central place than it has for members of higher income groups. For the former, being a Liverpool supporter (say) is embraced as part of his core identity in a way that cannot be matched by his work as a labourer or shop assistant. In contrast, a middle class golfer may also be a lawyer or a businessman, both of which come closer to the heart of his self-understanding than does his weekly round of golf.

Second, some sporting symbols have wider significance. In Northern Ireland, allegiance to Linfield FC and Cliftonville FC have strong political and sectarian overtones, which are extended to Glasgow Rangers and Glasgow Celtic. Hence, the appearance of Glasgow Rangers and Protestant paramilitary emblems on a number of headstones and the pall bearers wearing Glasgow Celtic football shirts at a recent funeral in a Nationalist part of the Province. Sport is integral to the broader culture, so that some of the symbols may have been saying, ‘He was part of this community’. Thus, some club emblems are ciphers for a broader set of loyalties and social ties that have more to do with local communal identity than with football per se. While this is undoubtedly true for Celtic and Rangers and for Glentoran, the same cannot be said of the English clubs that form the vast majority of the emblems. This leads to the third observation.

Only 5 headstones had symbols or inscriptions (c.6%) related to the local football club. The same number related to Glasgow Rangers while 20 (c.25%) related to Liverpool and 10 (c.12%) to Manchester United.

Two generations ago, this would not have been the case. The local football club was well supported and English teams lived on a different planet. Today, local clubs struggle to survive while the English premiership attracts money and talent like a black hole. But the Premiership also attracts loyalty, devotion, almost worship. People will sacrifice cash and comfort to support their team. Hundreds from the Province travel across the Irish Sea every weekend to attend matches throughout England, while thousands more sit glued to televisions in pubs, clubs and at home. What do the ‘Big Boys’ offer that the local lads don’t? How can it be that watching, on television, twenty two men kicking a ball round a field comes to be so important?

At one level the answer is not hard to find. Supporting any team brings me into a community that shares together joy and sorrow, success and failure, hope and despair. In this fellowship (koinonia?) there can be companionship, mutual commitment, even love (philia?). If these things cannot be found in a family, local geographical community or local sports club, then getting together with my fellow fans in the local Liverpool supporters club provides a community of mutual interest or even a surrogate family.

Further, for an individual who feels insignificant in his local community, the fellowship of the worldwide brotherhood of Manchester United supporters is at least some sort of substitute. The same comments might be made about the fellowship of a fishing club or motor sports club. The camaraderie that exists between people who know what it is to crash a motor cycle or land a perch comes from sharing common goals and from sharing common experiences of elation or despair. Any punter in East Belfast knows instinctively what it feels like to win or lose a bet on a tight finish, whether the horse is running at Ascot, The Macau Jockey Club or Belmont Park, so he can have ‘fellowship’ at his local bookmaker’s, or via television, with fellow punters around the world. Has the availability of cheap travel and high quality communication led to the decay in local community commitment, or has the decay in local community commitment led to the need to find ‘fellowship’ that is not geographically based?

Whichever, the Church of Jesus Christ has a community and a fellowship that is perfectly suited to our nature as human beings. Sadly, so often that fellowship is culturally foreign to the community outside and our shame is that too often the ‘fellowship’ of the tennis club or darts team is more winsome than that of the local church.

‘You’ll never walk alone’ appeared on a number of Liverpool supporters’ headstones, but also on the Glasgow Celtic supporter’s headstone. Its hymnic qualities might be taken to refer to the fellowship of the club or to something greater, so my fourth observation is that sport has the ability to bring both players and supporters into contact with something transcendent. It can lift people out of the mundane and into the quasi-mystical. One Manchester United headstone had attached to it a picture frame (c. 20cm x 10cm) edged with flowers, in which a Manchester United crest radiated beams of light. It wasn’t exactly an icon, but it came pretty close. ‘No player is bigger than the club’ is a mantra that encapsulates the idea of the individual being caught up into something bigger than himself and the team being more than the sum of its parts. At every level a sports club can be more than a collection of individuals meeting to pursue the same end - it can have a ‘spirit’ into which mere human beings are caught up.

Three graves had 50cm high figures of footballers. In each case the name of the deceased was on the back of the shirt, as it would appear if the person was playing for the team. This is sometimes done on replica shirts, bought by supporters although, more often, the supporter will wear the name of a favourite player. It appears that, somehow, the deceased has made the final identification with his team. In death he has been symbolically absorbed into a greater and more intimate ‘fellowship’. No longer an observer on the terraces or at the television, he is on the pitch, spiritually united with great players of the past, present and future.

If Scripture leads us to believe that celestial powers lie behind the forces of government and armies and, by extension, this idea may be extended to include multinational corporations, should we not say the same of sports clubs also? The spiritual forces that lie behind the affairs of our human race cannot be absent from the sporting realm. Christians must recognise this and respond prayerfully and robustly as we worship and proclaim to the world the One who has conquered the ‘principalities and powers’ and at whose feet, one day, all things in heaven and on earth will bow.

Fifth, sport has its demi-gods. Look at the recent Adidas fresco in Cologne station that apes the ceiling of the Sistine chapel (the image can be seen online at http://www.notcot.com/images/adibahn1.jpg). Think also of how George Best, who is buried with a simple headstone in this same East Belfast cemetery, has been described as a ‘legend’. In some ways he has every right to claim the epithet, but its use indicates how sport raises its heroes to the status of Leander (after whom many swimming clubs are named) and Cuchullainn (after whom a number of Gaelic Athletic clubs are named). In the ancient world, gods and demi-gods were common and were addressed by the EarlyChurch. We must address them today also, rejecting their right to be worshipped, but also addressing the underlying reasons why they become the objects of adoration.

Sixth, a number of headstones combined sporting symbols with other symbols such as paramilitary emblems or symbols of the local shipyard in which the deceased had, presumably, spent his working life. One headstone of a Manchester United supporter also had a figurine of an Orangeman, expressing his Protestant heritage, while another had a request that Padre Pio pray for the deceased, expressing the deceased’s Roman Catholic roots. What does this say about the relative strengths of these men’s allegiance to their team and to their religious beliefs? I have asked a number of people and no-one has been prepared to give a definitive answer to the following poser.

Imagine a fight breaking out between the Shankhill Road (Protestant) Liverpool Supporters Club and the Falls Road (Roman Catholic) Manchester United Supporters Club. If some members of the Shankhill Road Manchester United Supporters Club (or the Falls Road Liverpool Supporters Club) came along, whose side would they take? One can only guess where in the hierarchy of loyalties any individual’s allegiance to their sports club comes, but for some fans, loyalty to ‘the shirt’ comes close to loyalty to family or country and far beyond any religious loyalty. One thing is certain, however, throughout the world, loyalty to football clubs has led to much violence and even death. This comes perilously close to idolatry and a false religion that usurps the place that God alone ought to have in the lives of individuals and communities.

Conclusion

These inscriptions show the context in which we carry out our ministry and the context in which the church bears witness, a context with a seriously deformed understanding of value, identity and community. Into this context we bring the Gospel. How we bring it must be formed by the Gospel itself, but also by the lived reality of the context. Our challenge is to blend the two together in a way that is authentic to both. We have to understand the void in the hearts of people who have as part of their core self-understanding a football team that they may never have seen in the flesh. We have to carefully work out how to present the Gospel to people who understand death to be simply ‘gone fishin’’. We must order the lives of our churches so that they reflect the fullness of the Gospel and are genuinely welcoming to the worshippers of Lewis Hamilton, Dan Carter and Andy Murray. The Good news of Jesus Christ has outlived every sporting fad and will continue to do so. And if we are ever disheartened by the size of the task, we need do no more than remember the eschatologically profound words of Stuart Pearce, ‘I can see the carrot at the end of the tunnel.’