Losing my religion: what happened to the top-flight Easter double-header?

You can easily lose a morning in the Guardian’s archives, trawling through all the times the church wanted English football banned on Easter’s holy days.

My favourite story? The thunder and fury at the Liverpool Diocesan Conference in 1929, when a resolution asking why the Football Association “would not allow any man under its control to take part in any game on a Sunday, yet still sanctions matches on Good Friday”, was fiercely debated.

“Is it fitting,” the Rev JJR Armitage declaimed, “that at the very hour when we believe our Lord to have been enduring the agony of the cross, which led to the cry: ‘It is finished’, tens of thousands of men should be gathered in this Christian land, in the modern replicas of the ancient amphitheatre, to watch a few men kicking a leather football?”

The Rev JMP Potter even had an ingenious idea to smooth the waters: why not give football clubs money from the churches’ collections as a “good pro quo” in exchange for swerving Good Friday games?

It was all to no avail. The motion was defeated, by 143 votes to 132, which came as a relief to an erudite “man on the street”, vox popped by the Manchester Guardian. Alluding to the Pickwick Papers’ pompous, drunken and scrounging evangelist, he told this paper’s reporter: “There go the Stigginses and busy-bodies, who want to interfere with other people’s pleasures.”

Indeed. Yet there were plenty of other times when the clergy got their vestments in a twist over Easter football. In 1913, the Vicar of Cardiff was “pained and shocked at the incidents connected with the visit of Luton fans, when thousands of visitors came from the English town arrayed in all sorts of gaudy garments,” for a match on Easter Friday.

Although, as this paper reported: “He