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Good Morning. Tomorrow’s Champions League final in Porto between Chelsea and Manchester City ends a unique domestic football season across Europe. And with a big summer of sport planned it’s a good moment perhaps to review the role sport has played in helping many communities through the pandemic. The issues currently facing the International Olympic Committee as the delayed Tokyo Olympics draw closer replicate the interlocking moral dilemmas faced by organisers, participants and fans over the past 15 months. Balancing commercial pressures and the dreams of athletes from all over the world with the safety of the home nation is the story of our times. This week we heard of Wimbledon’s plans for its return this summer and that 18,000 spectators will be able to enjoy England’s second Test Match again New Zealand at Edgbaston. So I asked a large group of teenagers at a school in Surrey for their thoughts on sport during a year when they had largely been unable to participate. They were wonderfully articulate. It helped break the boredom. Lifted their spirits. Gave them hope. Some found disproportionately huge salaries distasteful. Others noted that money had not been the victor as spectator pressure resulted in the dramatic collapse of a proposed European football super league. After what we have all been through, sport has offered various quasi-theological insights into the importance of sharing stories and experiences, even when we were confined to quarters and unable to be physically present at shared events. Headline writers still evoke biblical characters and events to described these shared stories: a David & Goliath clash, a player walking on water or, like Lazarus, coming back from the dead. These biblical themes of the underdog triumphing, miraculous endeavour and a sudden turnaround in fortunes evoke aspects of faith and belief which scripture deals with on just about every page. Sport has undoubtedly lifted many people’s spirits over the last year. And, in a funny kind of way, as the theologian Roger Grainger observes, whilst simply sharing in rituals such as sport does not in itself produce faith; such rituals nevertheless express it on behalf of the people involved.