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.

Article

Culture

Freedom

Justice

11 September 2025

4 min read

Free speech for me, but not for thee

A hate crime hoo-ha and the limits of free speech

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Two brown bears fight while baring their teeth.

Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash.

It was the the legendary Manchester Guardian editor CP Scott who said “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.” His dictum hay have held a century ago, but it doesn’t stand up today. In post-truth societies, facts are anything but sacred. And, leaving aside for now whether the opposite of sacred is freedom, comment isn’t free either.

I don’t mean in the sense of whether or not you have to pay for it – you’re not paying for this, for example – but whether comment, as Scott took it for granted to be, is an act of freedom. Graham Linehan, the Father Ted comedy writer, temporarily lost his freedom to a squad of police officers at Heathrow airport for a social media post he’d tweeted: "If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls."

The subsequent hoo-ha has precisely been about whether Linehan should have been free to make his comment. The police, under prevailing hate-crime laws, felt obliged to arrest him. Subsequently the media, politicians and assembled chatterati – even the Met Police commissioner weighed in – wailed how ridiculous it all was and, adopting serious-face, what a threat it represented to free speech, which is one of the most potent graven images of our time. Facts may be free these days, but comment is sacred.

Except it also depends whose comments and opinions are deemed sacred. So some people’s speech is more free than others. Take the Free Speech Union (FSU), founded by the liberally-challenged Toby Young. Here, right-wing freedom of speech is inalienable and non-negotiable. So silly intrusions into the views of Islamophobes and critics of trans-activism? Outrageous. But supporters of Palestine Action (PA), nearly 1,000 of whose supporters had to be arrested by police for peacefully holding placards? Not a word. They’re all lefties, you see.

As Hugo Rifkind pointed out in The Times, neo-conservative and FSU director Douglas Murray was asked by Daniel Finkelstein whether his free-speech principles extended to PA’s superannuated supporters. Apparently not. And Reform UK’s Richard Tice simultaneously believes that protesters outside asylum hotels are “part of who we are”, but that the correct response to PA protesters is to “arrest and charge the lot. Jail them.” Forgive me, but I thought a central tenet of faith in free speech is that it’s consistently applied?

“Part of who we are ” used to be a tolerant, inclusive and pluralistic society. Not just campaign for our lot and bang up all the rest. And I’d contend that we should self-regulate freedom of speech rather than legislate for it. The Met Police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, seems to agree with that: “Regulations that were understandably intended to improve policing and laws that were intended to protect the vulnerable are now tying officers’ hands, removing appropriate professional discretion — which some call common sense.”

That “common sense” is much beloved of freedom-of-speech warriors at places such as FSU. But they always get to define what it is and who gets to benefit from it, because it’s tribal. “If they pick on you, we’ll pick on them,” declares Young on his FSU website. It’s freedom for my tribe to say what it likes, not yours. And freedom of speech is meaningless if it’s not for everyone, including your political enemies.

Where we agree is that freedom of speech should not be adjudicated by the law. There are enough laws without legalising what people can’t say or write. Where, I imagine, we disagree is that it shouldn’t be adjudicated by Young and Murray and Tice either. As matters stand, we have those who want to legislate for the right to free speech and those who campaign to restrict it. Nothing can come of that.

By regulating ourselves, the risk is run of sounding conservatively nostalgic for a golden age of civility that never really existed, or rather that was imposed by social authority. It’s the sort of proposed solution you hear when someone says it’s really a question of good manners. It’s true that freedom of speech largely worked in a period of deference, but deference was probably not a good price to pay for it.

What can be said is that, like any freedom, freedom of speech comes with congruent responsibilities. We hold a responsibility not to cause violence with what we say, even or especially if that means turning the other cheek. In ecclesiological management terms, this would make freedom of speech a pastoral rather than systemic provision. We serve each other; we don’t require the state to serve us.

Linehan’s post was fine up until it’s final phrase. But it’s peer pressure, not the law, that should have prevented him from using it. Taking the violence out of speech should be an educated, peaceful instinct. And that remains a social duty, not a governance one.

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