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Stadium anthems have become vehicles for protest and division

Maybe now is the time to hit pause rather than replay on a once well-respected custom started by the Welsh rugby team in 1905

Scotland players line up with mascots ahead of the international friendly match against Northern Ireland at Hampden Park. Both teams' anthems were roundly booed. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire
Scotland players line up with mascots ahead of the international friendly match against Northern Ireland at Hampden Park. Both teams' anthems were roundly booed. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire
Johnny Watterson's picture
Johnny Watterson
Fri Mar 29 2024 - 06:00

It’s a wonder how Uefa keeps abreast of it all.

Europe’s governing body for football fined Celtic FC almost €18,000 earlier this season after fans waved Palestinian flags during their Champions League match against Atletico Madrid in Glasgow.

The flags were deemed by Uefa to be “provocative messages of an offensive nature”. We’ll let that slide.

Fans, who had been warned by the Scottish club not to make displays, could be heard singing You’ll Never Walk Alone while holding the Palestinian symbols.

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In May of last year, the British and English national anthem God Save The King [GSTK] was met with resounding boos at Anfield before their match against Brentford. Timing was everything. It was the day Britain’s King Charles was coronated.

The club said it was asked to play the anthem by the Premier League to mark the coronation, despite strong opposition. The Daily Mirror’s northern football correspondent, David Maddock, tweeted that the booing coming from around “the entire ground” was so loud he did not even know the anthem had started.

Liverpool fans also made a barrage of noise to block out GSTK before the Carabao Cup final against Chelsea last month. They did it again against Fulham, as the Kop chanted on two occasions: “You can shove your coronation up your a**e!”

Celtic supporters also used the same chant in a Scottish Cup semi-final win over Rangers at Hamden Park.

The clip went viral, making news in places including Australia, India and the USA. It also turned up on BBC satirical show Have I Got News For You. To lighten the mood after guest panellist Ian Hislop mispronounced Celtic, comedian Maisie Adam jumped in, saying: “As part of the BBC’s impartiality do you think they’ll have to have that on Songs of Praise?”

This week Northern Ireland beat Scotland 1-0 in a friendly at Hamden Park. In what would have been a confusing juxtaposition for people in any other part of the world, the Scotland fans booed the Northern Ireland anthem GSTK and the Northern Ireland fans responded to the jeers in kind, whistling their way through Flower of Scotland, the anthem chosen by Scotland.

The issue of Gaza is different from that of anthems but they are related in having become tribal emblems. It’s not unrealistic to think that those booing GSTK this week in Hampden Park were the same Celtic fans who waved Palestinian flags. It is also no surprise that Liverpool and Celtic are among the most heavily supported clubs in Ireland.

Anthems have come a long way since the days they were generally respected. Originally a celebration of national pride and identity, of national achievement and a strengthening of sense of place, they have come from something simple to altogether something else.

Sport can thank rugby for beginning the tradition. The first anthem can be traced back to one match in 1905, the first time that Wales and New Zealand contested a game. Both teams were described as ‘undefeated’, as earlier that year, Wales had won the Triple Crown, beating Ireland, Scotland, and England in the annual competition.

Termed the ‘Game of the Century’, the Welsh and Kiwi teams met in December of that year at the Cardiff Arms Park. Before the start of the match, the All Blacks performed their prematch haka. In response, the Wales team sang Hen Wlad FY Nhadau (Land of my Fathers), a song that would slowly establish itself as the Welsh national anthem. Innocent beginnings.

More than 60 years later, in 1968, Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the black power salute during the US national anthem at that year’s Mexico Olympic Games. A year later Jimi Hendrix and his band shredded the US anthem at the Woodstock music festival.

The Olympic athletes and national mood had made the anthem a legitimate target. A 2021 story on a Hendrix website described how the rock star played Woodstock.

“The sounds Hendrix drew from his Fender Strat were literally an aural recreation of war,” wrote Wayne Pernu. “In between the machine-gun fire, bombs dropping, smoke billowing from napalm blazes, was a wrenching undercurrent that evoked the agonising polarity which tore our country apart and destroyed Vietnam.”

Hendrix also caused a riot in Dallas with part of his performance “mowing down the cops with his machine gun guitar motion”.

Capturing the zeitgeist, the reimagined version of Star Spangled Banner from Hendrix and the gloved hands of the athletes allowed anthems to become vehicles for political discourse and a way to engage with current events, a touchstone for dissent and protest.

For Liverpool fans, the sense of social abandonment goes back to the 1980s and Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher, when her government were indifferent to the industrial decline of Merseyside. In 2011, official papers revealed that Thatcher was secretly urged to consider abandoning Liverpool to a fate of “managed decline”.

In football grounds around Europe, fans regularly subvert Welsh rugby’s original message of, well, harmony.

An Olympic Games in France this summer, where Israel, Palestine, Ukraine and Russia (as neutral athletes) compete and the European football championships in Germany, are not expected to be free of public displays of anthemic hate.

Maybe now is the time to hit pause, rather than replay.

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