Cod Almighty | Diary

When the saints go marching in

18 August 2023

Your A46 Diary has been considering how much we expect from our footballers. We expect a lot, perhaps too much: we expect someone to adore.

Let's think about that word. To adore is to love, of course, but we’re not talking about some kind of affair here. No intense period of physical devotion followed by long evenings binge-watching Ted Lasso before moving onto gladly receiving texts to get more milk. Perhaps it would be simpler if it were a normal loving relationship, one in which we can become tired, move on, forget. But, no, love is cheap, this is adoration. To adore is to revere, to hold in the highest regard, to consider the objects of our adoration grand, above, more. Not merely mortal.

Revere takes us to venerate. Now we're something close to worship. We know that they're not gods, that they're not divine in any way, but there's something about them that makes them grow in our eyes so that they fill, infuse and enthuse every aspect of our lives. Not gods, but something close to them, something perhaps touched in some way by them, something that we canonize. We don't venerate heroes. We venerate saints. Footballers are our secular saints.

Immediately, we can declare this unfair; what footballer ever asked to be placed in this position? Not one, I'd imagine. Abu Eisa will almost certainly not want the saint tag. He scored a couple of goals, hardly a miraculous event, but his goals on Tuesday night, bathed in the somewhere between lunar and ethereal glow of the floodlights, felt somehow different, more special. It could be because it was our first win, first home goals, first goals for Eisa. It will be those things, absolutely those things and nothing more. And yet, it is more. It is an elevation, of them, and through them we can see the heights that a human being can achieve and perhaps, just for a moment, touch those heights ourselves. They are beautiful.

As the poet John Keats said, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty". Our saints create moments for us that transcend the mundanity of our daily lives, they are our beauty and their beauty is our truth and try as we might we can never quite recreate the experiences they give us. Eisa is now in our canon and we will both revere him and expect things of him that may at times be unreasonable. But that's the power of miracles. Can he live with it? I hope so and I look forward to extolling his worth, his beauty, to anyone who will listen.

And they will nod and smile at memories of beauty, of perfection, of adoration. It's more than love. To adore is to know that they are the best and so to expect nothing but the best because to adore is to be given hope, to be given the closest thing a secular society has to faith. We have faith. And so anything other than perfection is failure, something as simple as a misplaced pass is greeted with the kind of dismay that should only accompany a real-life loss, and whether a footballer wants that or not is immaterial. They are there. They are our beauty. They are our hope. To claim otherwise is self-delusion. To claim otherwise is because we cannot accept that they can fall, cannot accept that the thing we venerated, the thing we called beautiful, could let us down. We cannot accept that we were wrong, that the beauty we briefly touched wasn't perfect.

Right now, some are facing a difficult decision: Manchester United are reported to be on the verge of allowing Mason Greenwood back into their first team squad. If we had a Greenwood, many of us would probably try to hold on to the beauty of the young man, try to make the claim that rehabilitation is better than an assumption of recidivism, that those who condemn are themselves forgetting what is at the heart of faith: forgiveness.

But forgiveness is not a given in adoration. To be held to those highest standards is the hardest thing to bear. It's unfair, it's unreasonable, it's impossible. And we understand this. So, we forgive. We forgive a lot, more than just that misplaced pass. We forgive for their sake and for our own. We forgive everything that's reasonable to forgive. The line of reason is drawn differently for all. Our boundaries change and adoration stretches them almost to breaking. But sometimes, and Greenwood is of those times, we see the saint fall, we see them as they are: mortal. And mortals do not always receive forgiveness. For a saint to become mortal is to lose that beauty, that veneration. They might not have asked for it, they might not have wanted it, but they had it and when it is lost or when it is thrown away, they become ugly. Greenwood is ugly. Some will choose to ignore it, force themselves to see the beauty that they remember and some won't. But the ugliness will still be there.

Tomorrow, we welcome Mansfield to Blundell Park. I will try not to expect too much and still hope for miracles from our beautiful secular saints.