I confess to writing this month as much as a sports fan – a football fan in particular – as a vicar. I support Crystal Palace, and am writing this within 24 hours of their historic win in the FA Cup Final. This is for all supporters and participants of sport, indeed for all with a passion for something!
I’ve supported Palace since a child and am now 62. They’ve never won a trophy. They’ve suffered numerous relegations, celebrated promotions, toppled great teams on memorable occasions. But in 120 years never this. “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” will be a familiar feeling for many sports fans. Yesterday’s feeling? I can only describe it as beyond joy, a sort of sublime peace. And simple gratitude.
Personal stories always interweave these grand narratives. Penalty-saving-hero goalkeeper Dean
Henderson spoke afterwards of his father having died at the start of the season, and that all of this
was for him. Palace’s first ever FA Cup Final was in 1990, the first season after my own father died.
The opposition? Poignantly Manchester United, my father’s team.
And then there’s match-winner Eberechi Eze (see the picture above). The vicar is slipping in here, but anyone would have been struck, I think, by the simple open response he managed to utter when overcome in his post-match interview, “Honestly, I’m just grateful… Only God can do this, man!”
Palace went yesterday from being a team that had never won anything to one that had. The universe itself had shifted, it felt. It does that. In our tragedies too. We are surely interconnected, part of something greater – and ultimately glorious.
All power to Feniton FC, our school football clubs, and to all our wonderful local sports clubs. Tomorrow I’ll be visiting both our primary schools – and will be donning my red and blue scarf, like a joyful child myself.
