An Injury Time Winner

Those who engage regularly with my socials will be well aware how I like to use football (soccer) as a metaphorical method of exploring life’s bigger issues and topics.

Taking inspiration from my idol, Jesus Christ, I basically tell modern-day parables, using one of the subjects that most unites the world in passion, emotion and fascination – kicking a 22cm-diameter spherical bag of pressurised air around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_VYAVv3o4k

Absolute Scenes: Emi Buendia – who appropriately enough shares the same birthday as my idol, Jesus Christ, won the day for my beloved Aston Villa with a last-kick-of-the-match winner against Arsenal recently! Just watch the fans in the Holte End (the stand behind the goal) when Emi’s shot goes in!

Right Up My Street

Recently a friend of mine from my church, a fellow football fan and sociologist named Paul Garwood, lent me a book he knew I’d love – it’s entitled Injury Time by the author David Goldblatt.

Goldblatt is arguably the finest football historian there’s ever been; he’s a fantastic sportswriter and academic who skillfully weaves football and sociology together, contending (as quoted from the inside of the front cover of Injury Time) the so-called ‘beautiful game’ is the ultimate societal bellwether – a reflection of the populations’ virtues and flaws alike.

A good book, but not the Good Book.

The Unprecedented Polycrisis

You don’t need me to say how unprecedented, challenging and at times frankly bizarre the last few years of global history have been…

The economic crisis; unprecedented financial inequality; accelerating climate change; natural disasters more frequent and intense than ever; political upheaval; Brexit; waves of division, prejudice, racism and nativism; the Covid pandemic; the increase of mental ill-health; bloody wars in Europe and the Middle East that have threatened to start WW3; cyber-wars that have affected us all yet for the most part we don’t even know are happening; political meltdowns in the UK; Donald Trump becoming president of the United States (not once but twice) and the very real prospect of Nigel Farage becoming my country’s counterpart; and the mass addiction that’s sprung-up over the past fifteen years whereby many people seem unable to not pick up the kind of device I’m currently tapping these very words into if ever they have even the smallest window when they aren’t being stimulated!

It’s worth just taking a breath at this point…

Sometimes life can feel overwhelming

When **** Becomes Personal

The interwoven, simultaneous upheaval we’ve collectively been living through in recent years has affected us all – none of us have been immune, it’s precipitated great change in all our lives.

When the big-stuff of life gets personal, our emotions start to ramp-up – issues stop feeling remote or irrelevant to us and suddenly start mattering alot.

The global sociological issues the world has journeyed through without doubt played a big part in eliciting the huge changes that have taken place in my personal life… I ask myself, without the Covid-19 lockdowns and the fundamental differences and divisions in approach to life the Brexit referendum so obviously exposed, would I still be trapped in a toxic and unhappy relationship?

How people voted in the Brexit referendum revealed much about their foundational approach to life: do they seek to address challenging issues by engaging in positive, meaningful, respectful dialogue with others, or do they instead cut others off and avoid talking about contentious topics? It won’t surprise you to learn that I voted ‘Remain’…

Of course, that’s a moot-question – the answer to which undoubtedly has countless more layers of complexity and details of nuance to it – but I’m certain the changes in societal-environment we’ve all lived through at least in-part served to liberate me from the metaphorical prison I inhabited for so long.

Making Sense of It All

In Injury Time David Goldblatt uses football as a method of making sense of the almost overwhelmingly complex cacophony of changes that have happened in recent years.

As I’m sure we all know, if you can make sense of something, it helps you feel more relaxed about it… so if looking at the unfolding story of the world’s biggest religion (Association Football) helps you to do that, then that’s great!

On a personal level, drawing the analogous parallels between my own life-story as an individual and the journey my beloved Aston Villa have been on over recent years has given me much hope, inspiration and encouragement – we’ve both risen from years of incarceration in mediocrity and have been increasingly realising our potentials in life!

Yippee Aye Ayy! I’m proud to be a Holte-Ender… a Villan who is dreaming of the sky being the limit!

On a societal level, David Goldblatt takes a learned big-picture view of life and football in Injury Time, helping his readers make more sense of the polycrisis of recent years.

There is, however, one obvious thing I believe he misses seeing completely…

The World’s Greatest Religion

In my opinion soccer is the world’s biggest religion, but it’s not its greatest.

I believe that my idol, Jesus Christ, was quite literally the One-and-Only-Ultimate-Higher-Power-in-Human-Form… so that’s why, for me, Christianity is the world’s greatest religion.

In the opening pages of Injury Time, David Goldblatt writes these words in relation to the polycrisis that’s engulfed our world, gradually accelerating over the last twenty-five years or so:

“Intellectuals have struggled to weave together any kind of plausible story that might explain this concatenation of events. Serious contributions have been made to individual strands of our predicament – our imperial amnesia, democratic deficits and scandalous inequalities – but a popular narrative that describes their intersection has eluded us.”

Not so, David Goldblatt.

For almost six years now I’ve been far from the only person pointing people towards a very popular book in which a narrative is contained that many (including me) believe perfectly describes the unfolding polycrisis of the last years of human history.

The book I’m referring to is the last tome of the sixty-six that are most often bound-together to form the library-in-one-cover known as the Bible, entitled ‘Revelation’.

The Bible: Don’t judge the world’s best selling book of all time by its cover.

Have a read of and try to understand this mind-bending piece of prophetic literature, written millennia-ago using rich-imagery and deep, multi-layered metaphor in language readers of the day could have made some sense of… and I believe you’ll find it accurately foretells the story of the polycrisis of recent times that academics like David Goldblatt just can’t seem to get their heads around!

“The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who testifies to everything he saw – that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.” – Revelation 1:1-3

Take another breath at this point and consider the implications of this… both for collective society and you, personally.

Maybe this **** just got really real…

Go well, with love,

David

A Time of Re-Birth: The re-emergence of my beloved Aston Villa after years stuck in the doldrums has seemed to accurately mirror my own personal re-emergence as an individual these last few years… the underpinning foundation of which has been my ever-deepening faith in Jesus Christ (who, very appropriately, is also the underpinning foundation of my beloved Aston Villa – something you’ll already be aware of if you know your football history). This video, taken my me in the Holte End at Villa Park, contains a very different type of song to the ones I normally sing while stood there!