Holiday football matches used to follow a particular pattern. On Christmas Day a club would play a team, not necessarily in their own part of the country. However, there were Christmas Day trains in these days and on one occasion returning Charlton players won a drinking contest with the restaurant car staff. Hung over or not, the return fixture would be played the next day. On Good Friday and Easter Monday, this pattern would be repeated, but with a match on Easter Saturday in between! At least that was the case in London.
Holiday football matches used to follow a particular pattern. On Christmas Day a club would play a team, not necessarily in their own part of the country. However, there were Christmas Day trains in these days and on one occasion returning Charlton players won a drinking contest with the restaurant car staff. Hung over or not, the return fixture would be played the next day. On Good Friday and Easter Monday, this pattern would be repeated, but with a match on Easter Saturday in between! At least that was the case in London. Good Friday is not actually a bank holiday, even though banks close by convention. In the Midlands, it was long treated as a normal working day. We have the builders in and they were working on Friday. The point of this is that a row has broken out between leading religious figures and the Premiership over the staging of fixtures on Easter Day. Strong letters of complaint have been sent to the Premier League and Setanta.
One of the letters has come from the Most Rev Vincent Nicholls, about to be enthroned as the Archbishop of Westminster and known as a strong campaigner against what he sees as the evils of secularism. He has been backed up by the Anglican Bishop of Birmingham, the Right Rev David Urquhart, who argued ‘Commercial considerations are not all that matters.’ Now, on Easter Day, the Archbishop of York has reportedly pitched in as well. A spokesman for the Premiership insisted that it had done its best to consider Christian sensitivities. Easter Day was traditionally the one day when English football took a break over the four-day holiday weekend. However, the Premiership – unlike the Football League – has stopped playing matches on Easter Monday (quite why I am not sure). Only eight top flight games have previously been played on Easter Day, but four of these have come in the past three seasons – including last year when Manchester United played Liverpool and Chelsea met Arsenal.
Local churches in Birmingham have persuaded the Premiership to move the kick off of the Aston Villa v Everton game back half an hour from 1.30pm to 2pm, to minimise disruption to services on the busiest churchgoing day of the year. The local Anglican church is just a few hundred yards from the ground. The area’s church groups are calling on politicians to ban future matches on Easter Day. Aston Churches Working Together, which represnts nine local churches, is questioning why the Sunday Trading Act 1994 allowed the match, which is being televised by Setanta Sports, to go ahead while ensuring that supermarkets and other major traders remained shut. Tim Vine of the Premier League insisted, ‘Legally it is fine, and that has been the case for a long time now.’