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The best of men are but men at best. I would have given anything to be Frank Lampard’s brain as he stepped up to take a character-defining penalty against Liverpool in the
semi-finals of the Champions League.
What was going through Lampard’s head as he grabbed the ball — from more stable colleagues like Drogba and Ballack — to put it on the little white circle that separated him from Pepe Reina? It was the most soul-destroying distance that he had covered on a pitch. What if he had scored?
Conversely, what if he had missed? In retrospect, I believe that either way Lampard would have been a winner — not necessarily in the book of a sports junkie, but in the philosophy imparted to him by his mother, the late Pat Lampard.
That penalty was the most meaningful gift that Lampard could have given his mother, both in life and in her passing. As he loped off in an attempt to bring the Reds to their knees, Lampard celebrated his mother’s life and everything that she had wished for him to be — a son, a man and a footballer.
He knew, as he lasered the ball home with precision, that this was what she would have wanted. This was why she had made the sacrifices. This was what she had blessed him to be.
A small sum of a huge debt had been written off.
The rigour of performance has ensured that sportsmen have developed de-sensitised attributes of their own. They are devoid of passion, of commemoration, of sentiment. Robotic is the word. The capacity to put one’s emotion on the table seldom exists. Agents do not want their clients to do that in the event that the fans and the media may catch them out. A crucial blemish in the character could be spotted and a judgement made causing the carefully moulded equity to suffer. The only thing that counts is the scoreline. It sells the tickets and determines the salaries.
But Lampard’s penalty exemplified that there is a space for sensitivity. Room to make a crucial connection between those who have departed and those who are still there. This hit me like a jolt from the moment the penalty was taken and the goal was scored.
As he veered off, kissing the armband that he had worn in memory of his mother while searching through the faces of 40,000 fans for his grieving father, I thought of my own widowed mother, who lives in a small town in India, and all her sacrifices. I connected with the father and the son as they locked eyes in silent acknowledgement.
Somehow, I knew what they were thinking: It’s not the man who makes a man. It’s the woman.
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