Rodrigues and Mullally: rewriting history with bat and mitre

A match-winning innings and the rise to Archbishop both speak of the quiet power of possibility

Henry Corbett

Henry Corbett, a vicar in Liverpool and chaplain to Everton Football Club.

Sarah Mullally and Jemimah Rodrigues.

It’s a World Cup cricket semi-final between India and Australia. Australia are the world champions. They are unbeaten in their last 15 matches, and have won all their group matches impressively. They are overwhelming favourites. India have lost three of their group matches and only just managed to qualify for the semi-finals.

The match is being played in Mumbai. The ground is packed and millions are watching on television. Australia win the toss and bat first. They make 338 runs in their 50 overs, an outstanding score. India are facing the highest run chase in World Cup history to win the match.

India’s innings gets underway and a wicket goes down in the second over.

Out walks Jemimah Rodrigues, 25 years young, nervous, in front of a full crowd of 45,000, in the city where she was born and grew up. Earlier in the competition she had been dropped from the team. Just over 3 hours later she is 127 not out, off of just 134 balls, and she has steered India to one of the greatest wins in Women’s World Cup history, and her innings has been described as one of the greatest World Cup innings of all time.

What does she have in common with Archbishop-elect Sarah Mullally? They are both Christians, sisters in the worldwide family of God’s Church, and when they were both young children neither knew that there was any possibility of their being where they are now.

Jemimah Rodrigues was born in September 2000 and as a child didn’t know women’s cricket existed. She played with her two older brothers, and hockey looked a more likely avenue for her sporting talents. When she went to play cricket, encouraged by her parents, she was the only girl among 500 boys. Playing in a women’s cricket World Cup final watched by a sell-out crowd? Not possible, surely.

Sarah Mullally was born in March 1962. A woman as Archbishop of Canterbury? It was 1994 before the first women became priests, and 2015 when the first woman was a Bishop.

Now Jemimah Rodrigues has inspired a nation with her sensational innings that led to the defeat of the previously all-conquering Australian women’s team, and India went on to win the final against a resilient South Africa side in front of another packed crowd in Mumbai. It was the first time India’s women’s cricket team had won the World Cup. The most famous Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar posted on his social media of the team: “They have inspired countless young girls across the country to pick up a bat and ball, take the field and believe that they too can lift that trophy one day”. The Indian men’s cricket team’s head coach Gautam Gambhir posted: “You have not just created history, you’ve created a legacy that will inspire generations of girls.” Sarah Mullally becoming Archbishop of Canterbury will similarly inspire generations of young girls in their hopes and aspirations.

But there is even more to Jemimah’s inspiring legacy than encouraging girls to use their sporting gifts and helping to change the culture so that can happen. She has also been very open and honest about her struggles, disappointments, anxieties and about her very genuine Christian faith. In interviews she has spoken about how as a very young girl she was in a swimming pool when her young cousin tragically drowned and how that brought on a deep anxiety in her. She couldn’t face being in a classroom, she needed her mother there. She has continued to be open about nerves, crying, mental health, anxiety and to express gratitude for her family, her friends, her teammates (most of whom are Hindus) and for her Christian faith for the support and help they have given her. The first words in her post match interview after her match-winning 127 were a thank you to Jesus and the next were to thank her family. Another mindset she mentions is her concern to bat not for herself, but for the team. “I wanted to see a win for India, not something about myself.” She has also referenced a conversation with the above-mentioned legend of the Indian game Sachin Tendulkar who asked her about playing international cricket: “Are you nervous?” “Yes” was Jemimah’s immediate, honest reply, to which Tendulkar said “You are nervous because that means you care about doing well. So just go out and do your best”.

Jemimah Rodrigues has shown an honesty, a concern for others, for the team not herself, and an openness. “I will be vulnerable because I know if someone is watching they might be going through the same thing. That’s my whole purpose in saying it. I was going through a lot of anxiety at the start of the World Cup tournament.” And yes she does get trolls on her social media, but she will continue to be herself as God wants her to be. “When I am weak, then I am strong” writes Saint Paul to the Christians in Corinth giving him a hard time, and “I will keep on doing what I am doing”.

Here’s to more great innings from Jemimah Rodrigues (though she knows God’s love for her does not depend on her cricketing performances), and to more opportunities for girls as well as boys to use and enjoy their sporting gifts. And may Archbishop Sarah, as well as having in common with Jemimah a Christian faith and a story of opening up opportunities, share that aim of honesty and openness and may she know great victories along the way, not for herself but for the worldwide team of God’s Church.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Mental Health

Music

5 November 2025

1 min read

Deliverance in the dark: Springsteen’s Nebraska and the scars that shaped it

His starkest album emerged from a season of pain, where family, faith, and music collided

Giles Gough

Giles is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

An actor playing Bruce Springsteen walks down a dark street, hands in jacket pocket.

Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen.

20th Century Studios.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen-White as the titular rock star, follows Bruce Springsteen's attempt to make possibly his most unconventional album, Nebraska. This also happened to be one of the most difficult times of Springsteen's life, battling with mental health. Before the film's release, let's briefly explore some of the root causes of Bruce's depression, and find out what part family and the church had to do with it.

When it comes to Springsteen's discography, there's something of a disconnect between the casual fans' favourite and the album favoured by critics. Born in the USA is the monster hit album, with its era defining hits and blue-collar Americana. But Nebraska is the one that musicians and writers wax lyrical about. Written and recorded in a small bedroom in Colt's Neck, New Jersey, Nebraska is an album filled with acoustic melancholy folk tracks. With no conceivable singles and no chance of getting radio play, this was not the album that Columbia records wanted him to make, but it's the album Bruce felt he had to make.

"Nebraska was the pulling back of the bow, and Born in the U.S.A. was the arrow's release" writes Warren Zanes in his 2023 book, Deliver Me From Nowhere. In it, Zanes tracks with loving detail not only the technical problems of turning recordings that were only meant to be demos into songs that you could feasibly release, but also the mental health struggles that had driven Bruce to focus on such dark subject matter. It marked a moment of the artist unpacking his issues and answering the question: what do you do when you realise that the things you've loved most have begun to do you harm?

That harm can be traced back to Springsteen's early life in 1950s New Jersey. His father, Douglas 'Dutch' Springsteen, also suffered from mental health problems, at a time when there wasn't even the vernacular to describe such things. Dutch would grow to become jealous of the attention that his young son would get from the women in his family, which would exacerbate his existing paranoia. As well as being neglectful and demeaning, Dutch would also become violent towards his son. Springsteen describes in his autobiography how on one occasion, his father was teaching him how to box when Dutch threw a few open palm punches to his face that landed just a little too hard. "I wasn't hurt" Bruce writes "but a line had been crossed. I knew something was being communicated. […] I was an intruder, a stranger, a competitor in our home and a fearful disappointment". If this was young Bruce's experience at home, little respite was found in the outside world.

Springsteen grew up quite literally in the shadow of the Catholic church, and it permeated every aspect of his community. Bruce attended a Catholic school, where on one occasion he was hit by another student as a punishment from one of his teachers. This was compounded during his time as an altar boy, when the priest he was serving at a six am service gave him a public thrashing for not knowing his Latin. So before Springsteen started high school, he had been physically abused by his father, his school, and his religion. When these pillars of his life (who were meant to represent God to him) treated him this way, is it any wonder that young Bruce's take away from all this is that God is not a safe person to be around?

Years later, when Springsteen finally takes a break from the constant recording and touring cycle, he has no way to escape the damage done to him by the experiences of his early life. In Nebraska he illustrates the lives of down and outs, blue collar workers striving to get by, and even serial killers. The subject matter was so dark that when his manager Martin Landau first heard it, he started to worry about Springsteen's mental health. Thankfully, Springsteen would get the help he needed and forty years later, is a terrific example of someone who has done the work of tackling their own issues.

Where Bruce has landed on his relationship with God some forty years later is still quite hard to pin down. He's reluctantly adopted the adage of 'once a Catholic, always a Catholic' even if he admits he doesn't participate in his religion all too often.

There's no clear delineation point between him going from being a non-believer to a believer or vice versa, but that has not stopped him from creating some truly magnificent art with intense Christian themes. References to Jesus and the gospels pepper much of his musical output. Songs like Devils and Dust show the conflicted faith of a soldier in Iraq, whilst his song, The Rising, written in response to the terrifying events of September 11th, re-imagines the firefighters climbing the stairs of the twin towers as souls rising up to meet their maker. The finished product is a compelling anthem that would give even the most heartfelt worship song a run for its money.

It's quite possible that Bruce is interested in Christianity only in as much as it is woven into the thread of American life. How much the upcoming film will focus on his relationship with God or lack thereof is unknown, but the influence the church has had on him, for better or for worse, is undeniable.

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