I’ve been thinking about football. This has been a great season for the underdog and we’ve reveled in the exploits of Sutton United and Lincoln City, but at Champion Hill, the home of Dulwich Hamlet on Saturday afternoon I witnessed a feat to match any of them.
Picture the scene. It’s the quarter final of the FA Trophy, and Dulwich are 2-0 down after 18 minutes against the mighty Macclesfield Town, a team two divisions above us.
But the pink and blue army stands firm and for the rest of the 90 minutes they nag, badger, tackle and pass their way back into the game until Ashley Carew’s magnificent, 87th minute equalizer. The replay is at Macclesfield tonight.
It was fantastically exciting, as only a real underdog story can be. We love it when the little guy refuses to back down.
The thing is, though, no football team is really the underdog. Football teams, even at the lowest levels of the game, have networks of support around them. They have fans and volunteers and whole communities urging them on, watching the games, sharing the triumphs and disasters.
No, the real underdog is the one without any of those things. The real underdog is alone.
But Christians believe (and so do people of many other faiths for that matter) that God is for the underdog, that God supports not the mighty, but the minnow, not the powerful but the powerless.
The bible makes it very clear who he favours: “He defends the cause of the orphan and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you.” These are real underdogs: those who have lost their families. Refugees. And God is for them. Mary, Jesus’ mother knew that when she sang that, “He has brought down rulers from their thrones, but has lifted up the humble.”
In a world where it often seems that the strong are getting stronger and the weak are getting weaker and where the ‘foreigner residing among us’ is very often not loved, I reckon that’s worth remembering.
And in a world where, really, a football match is just a football match, I hope it’ll give me some perspective on tonight’s game at Macclesfield. Even if I do secretly hope (and believe) that God is rooting for Dulwich Hamlet.
God does, of course, support Dulwich Hamlet. Not least because the image above is the sort of thing the club stands for. We lost the replay against Macclesfield, though, and then the promotion playoff final away to Bognor Regis. But we were promoted the following season in the middle of an epic struggle to keep our home ground at Champion Hill. That struggle continues.