I feel a bit disappointed that FIFA has backed down in the great Poppy row that has blown up over the England football team wanting to wear a poppy on their kits in the match against Spain this weekend.
I'm not sure why the English FA decided this year in particular to make such a fuss over it, the FIFA rules regarding the non wearing of symbols on countries shirts has been respected since the World Governing bodies creation but this year the Prime Minster and Royal Princes have not just asked but arrogantly demanded that England are treated as an exception to the rule despite it being a long established rule that has failed to perturb the FA in decades of previous Novembers matches.
Fifa's reasoning for turning down the FA's request to have the poppies on the kit was that it would 'open the door to similar initiatives across the world, while jeopardising the neutrality of football'.
I wanted to hear FIFA say no and keep with it but now a precedent has been set for any of FIFA's 208 members to use their footballers for political or religious reason.
This does seem to be a part of the hysterical furore that has grown around the wearing, or non-wearing, of poppies over the last few years.
For some, not wearing the symbol is an act of betrayal, spitting in the eye of all those who have died in wars and conflicts through the ages and the whole thing seems to have been hijacked by vocal people insisting that it is a patriotic display of support for 'our heroes'.
The English FA, Prime Minister and Prince William were wrong to make any demands of FIFA to treat us differently to every other country in the world and FIFA were equally as wrong to give in to our childlike demands.
Will the same people screaming for the inclusion of a poppy be quite so vocal if the Indians wanted to wear a symbol to commemorate the millions killed in the reign of the British Raj or the Afghanistan team wanting do something for all those who have died under the recent Western occupation?
1 comment:
Brilliantly put. I totally agree... I can do no more than (incredibly lazily) copy some text that I wrote to my mate regarding this issue on
Facebook:
Personally, I’ll wear a poppy this year, as I do every year. However, declining to wear one is just as valid a choice, and a legitimate exercise of the freedoms that our elders fought and died for… The last time I looked this was the United Kingdom, not North Korea, so people need to STFU and accept this… FIFA, who get so many things wrong, have got this absolutely right. Agreeing to the FA’s demands would mean they’d have to agree to every other countries’ demands to display symbols of their own during FIFA games (and can you imagine where this might lead? e.g. when it’s India v Pakistan? Bosnia v Serbia? Rwanda v Burundi)…and it would also, potentially, put pressure onto players to wear something that they’re not personally comfortable with. As a worst-case scenario, this could even be a factor in team selection. If some of these poppy fundamentalists put half the effort into (for example) preserving the NHS (a REAL war memorial) as they do into the fetishisation of the poppy, trying to make us all conform to their rigid idea of what ‘honouring our war dead’ means, then this country would be in much better shape.
This was (obviously) written before the stupid-arse 'compromise' decision that FIFA and the FA came to. Arse.
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