BALLYMENA and Loughgall don’t want to play Sunday soccer, which has nothing to do, you understand, with the former being the prong on the buckle of the Bible Belt and the latter being just round the corner from where the Orange Order was founded.

Loughgall have recently won a couple of appeals against the Northern Ireland Football League’s (NIFL’s) plan to start playing matches on the Lord’s Day and while the Co Armagh club have maintained a manly Christian silence about their modest legal victories, Ballymena FC were out yelling ‘Alleluia – praise the Lord!’

“We will continue to oppose Sunday football on the basis of the religious beliefs of the players, staff and supporters of Ballymena United FC and also the mental and physical health of our players, staff and volunteers involved in the day to day workings of our club,” the club said in a statement. 

You’ll note that they didn’t say “religious beliefs of some players, staff and supporters”; they said “the religious beliefs of the players, staff and supporters” period (as they say in God-fearing America). Rather as if they were speaking for everyone at the club.

Now I’m not saying that you can tell what a person does on a Sunday by his name – I wouldn’t dream of such a vulgar generalisation. But there’s a better than even chance if your name is Campbell Gibson you’re not at Corrigan Park watching the St John’s U13 hurlers. Similarly, if you’ve a fada or two in your moniker it’s not likely you’re in a gospel tent in a field outside Portadown with your eyes closed and your palms turned up.

“Sunday football will deny a club operating on a part time basis the opportunity to have a rest day of which we should all be entitled,” the club continued, and while there’s little doubt that a day of rest is something that we all need, there’s no reason why that day of rest can’t be a Saturday, the day on which Ballymena play most of their matches. Unless ‘Rest’ (point No.2 in the Ballymena sermon) is the same as ‘Religion’ (point No.1 in the Ballymena sermon).

The monochrome days of the past when the swings in the playparks were chained and God Save the Queen was played at the end of the film during a night out at the cinema are gone – but they cast a grey shadow. Shopping centres don’t open till 1pm, although smaller businesses do. I always wondered why this was, so I checked it out and found the Sunday trading rule relates to the size of the building: “Verily shall ye open your doors on the Lord’s Day if thy floor space be undereth 280 metres square.” 

And of course you’re not allowed to play soccer. Which is a rule that’s taken directly from St Paul’s Letter to the Hypocritians. Because does anybody imagine for a moment that when a  Ballymena board member is relaxing at home on a Sunday and Man Utd are playing Liverpool at 4.30 on Sky the God-fearing club official is in the parlour singing ‘Be Thou My Vision’ while his wife plays the Yamaha? It’s possible, of course, but it’s not, to borrow a currently popular political phrase, “a characterisation I recognise”.

And while the Ballymena and Loughgall administrators are ensuring their own colleagues observe the Sabbath, they’re contributing to a UK-wide financial model that ensures that Sunday football is the rule and this little corner of paradise is the exception. And that’s a pretty poor bit of evangelising, if you ask me.

I’ve given up trying to figure out Bible-thumpers, though. It’s not that so many people I know – friends and family – have awful stories to tell about supposedly devoutly Christian folk (they’re always folk) that they work with. It’s not even the terrible example I see being set every day by those who have been washed in the blood of the Lamb. It’s all to do with the mid-80s and my first car...

A second-hand Nissan Micra L, it was, which was so determinedly bottom-of-the-range that it didn’t have a passenger-side wing mirror. In the best tradition of second-hand car salesmen, the guy at the Lisburn forecourt didn’t share this valuable piece of information with me, and of course I didn’t notice for quite a while – for 90 seconds after I drove off in it at least. 

I motored happily around for a few months without any trouble (except for literally everything happening to my left) before I had my first ever puncture, and as I knelt by the side of the road looking the nail-head sitting flush with the tyre tread, it was time for me to do my first wheel-change. I lifted the stiff carpet from the floor of the boot and there was the spare, but it was plastered in yellow Post-It notes so that it resembled nothing so much as a large paper and rubber flower.

Each of the Post-Its contained a Bible verse painstakingly written in a neat and tidy hand. Not just the ‘Samuel 1:4’ abbreviation either: The full line. And so I sat on the edge of the boot in a lay-by on the Knock dual carriageway and picked and read; picked and read; picked and read:

“What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole word and lose his soul?”
“The wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.”
“Fear not, for I am with you; be not afraid for I am your God.”
“Consider the lily of the field. Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully.”
“Verily shalt he who spends his time in pointless endeavours be considered a total head-the ball.”

That kind of thing.

I spent a long time after that day thinking about the person who wrote those notes. Did they do it the day they bought the car? Or did they do it the day they decided to sell it, so that somebody like me would reap the, ah, benefit? And might they not have been better employed putting all that time and effort doing the Lord’s work in a soup kitchen?

Or at a football club?