11/06/2026
Real men, subs and a Saviour
DOUBTLESS much will be made of the importance of substitutions as football’s 2026 World Cup story unfolds.
But with multiple switches commonplace in today’s professional sport – five in top-flight football and eight in its rugby counterpart [three of whom must be front row specialists] – any younger reader probably will be amazed to learn how things used to be.
Although substitutes had featured in Continental football from the 1930s, it was the 1965/66 season before one replacement per team finally was permitted in the English League. That continued up until 2020.
So when Liverpool left-back Gerry Byrne suffered a broken collarbone three minutes into the pre-subs May 1, 1965 FA Cup final against Leeds United, he was simply told: “Try not to get hit by the ball because that could puncture your lung.”
Because that match went to extra time, Byrne spent a further 117 minutes ensuring Liverpool achieved their first FA Cup final triumph.
Nine years earlier, Manchester City goalkeeper, Bert Trautmann had played for the closing 17 minutes of the 1956 FA Cup final against Birmingham City with what an X-ray taken three days later revealed was a broken neck. His side won 1-0, incidentally.
Between 1949 and 1964, Trautmann – who had been a World War II German paratrooper, Iron Cross recipient and escapee from a Russian PoW camp - made 545 City appearances.
They don’t make men like Bert Trautmann and Gerry Byrne any more…
But heroic though they were, their sacrifices are totally eclipsed by that of history’s greatest ever substitute who deputised for the entire human race.
A la Billy Graham: “God proved His love on the cross. When Christ hung there, and bled, and died, it was God saying to the world, ‘I love you’.”
Charles Studd (1860-1931) - an England Test cricketer and Anglican missionary to China - said: “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great to make for Him.”
Because, nstinctively, we try to avoid pain, these words of Mother Teresa really challenge us: “I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.”
Just as we don’t seek pain, neither do we welcome temptation. In fact, we pray: “Lead us NOT into temptation,” though here I freely admit that while ‘but deliver us from evil’ tallies perfectly with the nature of the God I try to serve, the idea of us being ‘led into temptation’ by Him does not.
So I turn to Paul’s first letter to the Church in Corinth where I find this: “No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.
“But when you are tempted, He will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.” (1 Corinthians 10:13).
And I am equally reassured by the same writer’s words found in Romans 5:8: “But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Three adjectives which I think best prefix that depth of love are ‘perfect’, ‘unconditional’ and ‘divine’.
Paul Washer, founder of the Heart Cry Missionary Society, admitted: “I have given God countless reasons not to love me. None of them has been strong enough to change Him.”
Meanwhile C.S. Lewis stressed this: “God’s love is not dependent on us. The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
Or in John Piper’s words: “Our faith will always have flaws in this life. Thankfully, God saves us based on Jesus’s perfection, not our own.”
There is no substitute for Jesus, because to paraphrase Cecil Frances Alexander:
“There was/is no other good enough
To pay the price of [my and your] sin.
HE ONLY could unlock the gate
Of heav’n and let us in.”
A loud ‘Amen’ to that?
Just a thought…
