While Jemimah thanked Jesus for helping her through the semi-final against Australia, Sachin Tendulkar’s Gods travelled with him in his kit bag. (X)Jemimah Rodrigues is trying her best to push the lump down her throat and failing miserably. She has just played the inning that would change her life forever. Thrust under the spotlight after her match-winning 127 in the World Cup semi-final, she has a microphone in her hand. The world wants to hear her speak. “I thank Jesus, I couldn’t have done this on my own .. he carried me through this” — that’s how she starts her thanks-giving.
The atheist might smirk but Jemimah is one among the many athletes who bank on some higher power — religion, spiritual or philosophical — to deal with the complexities of professional sports. All alone on the field, burdened by unrealistic expectations and with repercussions of failure dire, the pros need company when dealing with crisis. The troubles of the sporting superstars are too layered for the mortals to understand.
Religion and sports is a fascinating conflation, it’s an alliance that inspires humans to push limits and achieve incredible feats. Faith can move mountains but it can also score runs and take wickets.
Sachin Tendulkar’s Gods travelled with him in his kit bag, Suryakumar Yadav chants Hanuman Chalisa while batting. Usain Bolt’s starting blocks routine is about drawing the sign of the cross and throwing a gaze to the skies. It’s a request to the Gods to make him fly across track.
#JemimahRodrigues, take a bow! 🙌#CWC25 Final 👉 #INDvSA | SUN, 2nd Nov, 2 PM! pic.twitter.com/2Ov9ixC7Ai
— Star Sports (@StarSportsIndia) October 30, 2025
When the Ireland-born England captain Eoin Morgan won the closest-ever 50-overs World Cup final in 2019, he was asked if it was the famous “luck of the Irish” that took his team past the finish line. Morgan smiled and recalled what his teammate, the leggie Adil Rashid, had told him after the match. “Rashid told me Allah was with us,” he said.
On those rare occasions when the players open up on their ways to deal with the pressures, the rationale of their religiosity comes out. Some time back, Jemimah, a church regular, had appeared on a podcast with fellow believers, the two former South African batsmen JP Duminy and AB de Villiers. The senior SA pros have shared a dressing room, had long Holy conversations and shared a magical moment of enlightenment.
On the podcast, Duminy would ask AB about the role faith had played in his career. AB would talk about his early anxious days in international cricket when he firmly believed that everything was in his hand and “it was all about him”. But with time that would change. “It is about me, I didn’t want my family to be down … I was fighting for my dear life to stay in the Proteas set up,” he would say. This was AB giving a peep into the mind of a champion driven to succeed but over-estimating the capacity of the human mind to take pressure and find solutions.
It was on a 2013 Sri Lanka tour, AB, during a session with Duminy and teammates, saw the light. That was time, the original Mr 360 says he understood the virtues of letting things go and let the Almighty take charge. “That’s when you realise, it is not about you … one needs to make it about Him. Make a conscious decision to say I am here just to entertain people for you … it is about Him,” he says. “I certainly try to remind myself constantly that it’s not about me.”
Jemimah too says that faith doesn’t ensure success all the time but it surely frees your mind, it doesn’t let you feel lonely. “Sometimes things don’t go the way you want … it boils down to trust in his hand. That changes your perspective completely when you go out there on the field … you just want to play for Him and please Him and, try and win people for Him.”
Faith provides an assurance that the best will happen to you and it also helps you be in a bubble and be true to the process that you have trained to follow. It’s the blissful space, the zone every athlete aspires to be in.
“We had Allah with us as well”: Captain Eoin Morgan pays tribute to the diversity of England’s World Cup winning cricket team pic.twitter.com/NAAGbCvKw9
— The Guardian (@guardian) July 15, 2019
India’s Test star Cheteshwar Pujara believed in spirituality and power of chanting. In the book The Diary of a Cricketer’s Wife: A Very Unusual Memoir, Cheteshwar’s wife Puja spelled out the importance of praying to India’s reputed batsman, who retired this year after playing 100-plus Tests.
“The endless hours he spent praying and chanting played a large role in shaping his personality and became an inextricable part of every facet of his life. Very soon after our marriage, I discovered that he often chanted chaupais or quatrains from the Hanuman Chalisa while he was at the non-striker’s end …,” she writes. “Prayers were an intrinsic part of Cheteshwar’s coping mechanism. They had helped him handle his mother’s death, his father’s surgeries, his own medical procedures, and every difficulty and loss he had faced in his young life.”
So much so that he once tried to deal with his wife’s migraine by holding her hands and chanting. That didn’t seem to work, the book says. Pujara would also recite a mantra given to him by his spiritual guru during his “daily devotional routine, but most especially, when the going got tough”.
Pujara leaned on spirituality from an early age but his contemporary, Virat Kohli, took some time to take that path. Like AB, Kohli, in one of his early interviews, had thrown a rhetorical question to an interviewer when asked about religion. “Do I look the pooja-path kind,” he had said. Years later, now a father of two, Virat would be seen in the company of sadhus and monks. Video from those meetings would have him talking about “inner peace” and other such ancient wisdom.
Even the intimidating Aussie opener Mathew Hayden had a spiritual side. He would take ‘the cross’ to the crease. An article in The Record, a website that describes itself as the “the best in Catholic news from across the Archdiocese of Perth”, says Hayden’s resilience was because of his Catholicism. The piece quotes Hayden as saying, “When batting, I make this Sign of the Cross on my palm. I actually love doing that because when I make the cross across the middle I have a little saying that says ‘Whatever happens today, it’s for You (God)’. That’s part of what I do. I love that part of the day.”
Faith can also turn “a fiery little bugger” into the calmest cricketer with the most serene personality who never swears. That’s how England all-rounder Moeen Ali’s father Munir explained his son’s transformation to this newspaper some time back. Moeen’s outlook to life changed after a long chat about Islam with a West Indian supporter who was acquaintance. “He wasn’t a calm boy, growing up, but as he has gotten older and deeper into religion, he has grown a lot calmer. It has had a great effect on his cricket, and life. By that Ramadan, almost overnight, he was a different man,” Munir would say. That different man would serve England for long, be part of Morgan’s World Cup winning team.
But there were hurdles too. The county circuit wasn’t used to a player with a long flowing beard who prayed five times a day. Being a 12th man at Worcestershire, Moeen didn’t have a designated corner for himself and practiced his faith. Help came from the team’s coach and England’s county legend Graeme Hick. “Worcester it was a little difficult, because I was 12th man and I didn’t have a spot in the dressing room. I remember Graeme knew me, and knew this was a problem for me, so he moved his bags so I had room to pray.”
All dressing rooms need to make space for every kind of Faith.
The atheist might smirk but it can make doubters turn into Believers.
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