Goals and Ghosts

Unlike motor racing and horse racing, football does not offer death as a normal occupational hazard. And yet the game is haunted by mortality: the ghosts of the dead spectators on the terraces at Heysel and Hillsborough, the occasional player who collapses on the pitch from an unsuspected arrhythmia. This season, it was the Motherwell captain, Phil O'Donnell, remembered the following Saturday with black armbands and a minute's silence or applause, a form of tribute now also increasingly paid to victims of tragedies external to the game: 9/11, 7/7.

Even by these standards, though, Wednesday's match between Chelsea and Liverpool was a strange combination of sport and morbidity. Visibly grieving for his recently dead mother, Frank Lampard looked tearfully to the heavens on international TV, then blew kisses to his mourning father in the stands, after scoring the penalty that takes his team to a Champions League final in Moscow which, in another way, is also overshadowed by dark thoughts. Assuming their visas are processed in time, can Chelsea and Manchester United supporters behave with enough decorum in the city to avoid a potentially terrifying intervention by the Russian security forces?

The reason that top-level sport is such a compelling form of entertainment is that it combines athleticism at a level spectators cannot begin to understand with psychology that invites easy empathy. What would it be like to take a penalty at a crucial stage of a game? How, then, would it be to attempt that shot a few days after your mother's death? The two components of sporting excellence - muscle and mind - came together in scenes that will not easily be forgotten by those who saw them on TV.

Some of the recent overlaps between football and death have been criticized for mawkishness, a reflex Diana-ism. Most football fans in England had never heard of the tragic Motherwell captain until commanded by stadium tannoys to pay respect to him. And why was it necessary for football to pay separate tributes to the dead in New York skyscrapers or London subways, days after numerous silences elsewhere?

At least Pat Lampard had a direct connection with the Chelsea v Liverpool fixture, through the presence of her son and her long support for his career. Even so, there was still a possible objection to private grief becoming public theatre, with the Liverpool captain, Steven Gerrard, presenting his bereaved England team-mate with flowers on the pitch, a gesture that might better have been left to the dressing room.

Grief, though, has become a public business: Vanessa Redgrave opened this week at the National Theater in Joan Didion's shattered and shattering monologue about the consecutive deaths of her husband and her daughter. Didion wrote her way through bereavement because she is a writer; Lampard reacted by playing football because that is his job. Both acts can be viewed as self-centered but, as Didion's husband was a writer and Pat Lampard both the wife of a footballer and mother of a footballer, it's reasonable to think that these were the tributes they would have favored.

The deep embrace between Lampard and his manager, Avram Grant, as the player left the pitch, was also genuinely moving. Although there are considerable doubts about Grant's footballing knowledge, he has an unusual appreciation of family and grief, having lost almost all his paternal relatives to the Holocaust. Where another manager might have concluded pragmatically before the match that "the lad's head is nae in the right place", this coach perhaps appreciated that having the strength to continue can be a form of memorial.

Extending the solemn underlay to the game, Grant, at the final whistle, fell to his knees on the rain-soaked surrounds of the pitch in what looked like a prayer. One of the most over quoted comments in sport is the aphorism attributed to the late Liverpool manager, Bill Shankly, that "football isn't a matter of life and death: it's more important than that". Always dangerously glib, the sentiment became toxic once Liverpool had been involved in the Hillsborough and Heysel stadium disasters.

Grant and Lampard, from their different family perspectives, know that life and death matter far more than football but have also shown that sport can be a small kind of life force. But one set of English football fans abroad has previously proved to be a death force, and those in the game inclined to prayer should offer one that the invasion of Moscow by two groups will not lead to more armbands, flowers and silences.