You can easily lose a morning in the Guardian’s archives, trawling through all the times the church wanted English football banned on Easter’s holy days. My favourite story? The thunder and fury at the Liverpool Diocesan Conference in 1929, when a resolution asking why the Football Association “would not allow any man under its control to take part in any game on a Sunday, yet still sanctions matches on Good Friday”, was fiercely debated.
“Is it fitting,” the Rev JJR Armitage declaimed, “that at the very hour when we believe our Lord to have been enduring the agony of the cross, which led to the cry: ‘It is finished’, tens of thousands of men should be gathered in this Christian land, in the modern replicas of the ancient amphitheatre, to watch a few men kicking a leather football?”
