The least shocking thing about World Cup week one is that Piers Morgan is in Qatar working for Fox. Morgan was recently protesting against protesters, the hyper woke, the elite liberal left and their war on free speech, more dangerous than Covid-19 apparently.
His reasoning for travelling conscience-free to the Gulf state, as he explained to the English news podcast The News Agents in this week of meek, mild and megaton level protests, is because if you look at any country, they’ve all got a bit of nasty in them.
Morgan’s whataboutery was epic and self-serving. Feeble-minded losers were hissing out their disgust a day late and a dollar short in Qatar. It was, he said, something to bitch about 10 years ago, not now. People did.
His isn’t the way everyone sees it. Protest is often about opportunity and works best when it attracts eyeballs, although the side-splitting irony of this week was that it was the unwillingness to protest that exposed football. Armband activists. Sigh.
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One Love, the least offensive, most ambiguous, deliberately enigmatic, pointedly meaningless, decided-by-committee slogan ever minted was way too much for Qatar and the gladiators caved. The threat of a yellow card for One Love and commitment buckled.
Captain Harry Kane and his MBE – was there ever a chance he would buck the Football Association and protest? – put himself in some kind of jeopardy, as the FA explained, “we can’t put our players in a position where they could face sporting sanctions including bookings”.
You might ask yourself whether a protest that is sanctioned by the same body against which the protest is directed, really hits all the notes to be a meaningful protest. Be sure that if it is permitted to take place, it will have little or no impact. Protests work best when expressly not allowed.
Taking the knee is no longer the inflammatory action it was when Colin Kaepernick first took it. The normalised knee has evolved into a salute of solidarity, agreement, unanimity and has stopped being subversive or incendiary. The tournaments now permit it, the teams allow it and the individuals who wish to take part, do so.
Twice I’ve had to ask myself if I was willing to not take part in a sports event and, in effect, demonstrate or make a protest. One I did play in and the other one I did not. They were both low profile.
In 1981 as captain of the Trinity men’s hockey team, we were drawn to play against the RUC in the Irish Senior Cup at their grounds in Newforge Lane in Belfast.
I was a GAA player, who had taken up the game because it was played in the Dublin school I had landed in after arriving from west Belfast. My mother still lived there. But as a 20-year-old student there were some outstanding issues with the RUC.
I, rightly or wrongly, saw them as an institution that was biased and favoured one side of the community over the other. As a peaceful, personal protest I didn’t want to play.
I was told by some friends not that I should play in the match, but as captain that I had to play in the match. That the university would probably have no sympathy with the protest view never came into the thinking.
The consequences of letting down others, injuring the team, being beaten and losing a cup match were the overriding forces. The conclusion was, making a personal protest was a selfish act. I played in the match.
The other time a choice had to be made arrived a few years later, when an Irish hockey team was invited to go on an all-expenses paid tour to South Africa to play a few games against the national side.
Apartheid was still a central part of the South African political system and rebel tours in cricket and rugby were common place throughout the 1980s. The sport didn’t have rugby’s profile and very few people knew about the trip. An easy decision to make, that was a “no, thank you”.
The point is protesting isn’t always as simple as individual choice. The decision of Kane’s England and the other European nations not to wear the One Love armband because sanctions could have hurt them is understandable, although Roy Keane’s view of taking the yellow card hit is delicious.
In a team everyone, bar nobody, must buy into the worth of a protest, which is empowering, otherwise it becomes divisive, alienating within the group and unrepresentative.
There are ways. The current German team covering their mouths before the game against Japan, or a black fist in the air from an Olympic podium during the American national anthem in Mexico 1968.
So too the defiant silence of each Iran player during their national anthem ahead of the game against England. It was probably the most consequential protest act in a sporting arena since the black gloved salute of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, given the capacity for violent reprisal from the regime the Iranian players were facing down. Their defiance was truly courageous.
Each player is surely contemplating the possibility of their act inviting dire reaction.
As a group, they are no liberal elite. This week, we were well schooled on consequential protest.
