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

Belief

Culture

Music

Romance

22 May 2025

3 min read

Is Alex Warren singing a love song, or a worship song?

Ordinary's lyrics speak to a fundamental human desire, even when we don’t realise.

Ed Chan-Stroud

Ed is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University.

A singer holding a guitar raises his head with closed eyes.

Warren on stage.

Mike M. Cohen, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Alex Warren’s Ordinary is number one in the UK charts. At first glance the song appears to be a love song, and I would guess this is how it’s been heard during its 400million streams.

Spend more time with the song, though, and it becomes hard to ignore the theological imagery. “stayin’ drunk on your vine,” sings Warren – a conscious (he’s a Catholic) borrowing of St John’s image of the human person as united to God like a branch to a vine. “You’re the sculptor, I’m the clay,” is a direct reference to St Paul. Warren adds to these biblical allusions images primarily associated with Christian worship, including references to ‘holy water’ and ‘kissing the sanctuary.

So, Ordinary is certainly a love song, it’s just not clear who Warren is singing to. A human lover? Or a song to the Triune God, the One revealed in Jesus Christ?

I’m not really interested in the meaning Warren intended to convey. But I am interested in what the popularity of the song might say about the human heart.

As St Paul stood before the Athenians he told them he came with news of the ‘Unknown God’; one whom the Athenians did not know but who they deeply desired to know. Might the popularity of songs like Ordinary reveal the deep desire that human beings have for a God they do not yet know? To my mind, the 400,000,000 streams of Ordinary speak of a desire to meet with the God who is Love, the God who invites us into a union, a love, more intimate than the branch and the vine.

In one of my favourite songs, Florence + the Machine insightfully explores what it might mean to love someone without knowing it. In South London Forever, she tells us about a time when she was ‘young and drunk and stumbling in the street’. The tone is light, and the regular refrains of ‘it doesn't get better than this’ capture the (sometimes literal) ecstasy which often accompanies youth.

Yet the song also captures a real sense of loss. Florence describes how ‘I forgot my name, And the way back to my mother's house’. As the song builds, the refrain becomes deeply melancholy, with Florence moving from belting out that life had never been better to describing how:

‘Everything I ever did, was just another way to scream your name, over and over and over and over again’.

It is with these words that the song finishes.

But whose name is Florence screaming?

The song does not say. But, might it be God’s name? Indeed, Florence hints at this with a singular reference to God at the heart of the song. On this reading, South London Forever becomes a story about recognising one’s own failed attempts to find happiness as an attempt to find God. It becomes a story about seeking God without even knowing it.

Intriguingly, the great North African Bishop, St Augustine of Hippo tells a similar story in his Confessions. Augustine’s spiritual autobiography is, at least in part, a story of his deep struggle with a desire for sexual intimacy. It is a story of seeking out fulfilment in strange places such that Augustine slowly becomes a stranger to himself, and as Florence puts it, loses the way back to his mother’s house. Looking back over these attempts to find happiness, Augustine comes to recognise that it was God all along that he was looking for ‘how deeply even then, the depths of my heart were sighing for you’.

The story of songs like Ordinary and South London Forever is that the human heart always desires God, even when the heart is looking for God in strange places.

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