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

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.