Fabrice Muamba's collapse shows how prayer comes naturally to footballers
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Version 0 of 1. Fabrice Muamba dropped on the pitch as if dead. The next thing that happened, after the paramedics reached him, was a member of the opposing team dropped on his knees to pray. No one jeered. There has been an outpouring of prayer requests on his behalf since then. There is a hashtag on Twitter: even the front page of the Sun says "God is in control", quoting Muamba's fiancée. This isn't marginalised religion. In fact it is such a public demonstration of faith and prayer that it's hard to reconcile it with our normal worldview. So what's going on? Is it as simple as there are no atheists in intensive care? Football, like all elite sport, is a pretty superstitious business. The gap between success and failure can be measured in inches but its consequences in tens of millions of pounds; and the players are constantly pushing at the limits of their skill, so that without a little luck as well nothing can work. But if they worship anyone, it ought to by Tyche, the goddess of chance. English footballers are not recruited from the churchgoing classes – though African ones such as Muamba are much more likely to be Christian or even Muslim. You might say that some footballers also set themselves up as objects of worship. There is a Buddhist temple in Thailand with a statue of David Beckham among its other deities, and one premiership footballer is supposed to have a lifesize statue of himself, in golden fibreglass, to greet and overawe the visitors to his mansion. But there is a difference between a hero and a deity: deities are immortal and heroes die. The fate of even the most wonderful professional footballer is certain. He will grow old. Younger men, with half his skill and none of his cunning, will beat him to the ball. No, sportsmen can't really believe they are gods. So a surprising number of them find prayer entirely natural. "They pray from instinct, like the rest of us, unless we think we know better," said the Rev Owen Beamont, the chaplain to Millwall football club, when I asked him. It was surprising to see Gary Cahill, a Chelsea player who had spent two seasons alongside Muamba in another team, pull up his shirt to reveal a vest with "Pray 4 Muamba" underneath it after he had scored the day after the accident – but he was not punished, although it is normally an offence to display slogans like that. Nor was he mocked. Even a quick scan of the Twitter stream around that hashtag reveals only one racist Texan using it for mockery. One of the craziest bishops I ever knew once said to me, with relish: "There are no atheists in cancer wards." But that has not been my experience. I rang a couple of priest friends to ask if this kind of outburst of reverence was normal. None seemed to think it was inevitable. One of them said that she had, of course, come across cases of the opposite, in which deeply religious people seemed to lose their interest in God as death approached. "I have to see one woman who is so busy dying she doesn't have any time for anything else." This wasn't a loss of faith, she said. It was just a loss of interest. Perhaps the question of God becomes entirely theoretical when you know what the outcome will be. The time for prayer is before, or after the fact: in either case, when everything is uncertain, as it is now with Muamba. |