Allow me to say that, given the choice between an hour conversation with Nigel Farage or Georgia Stanway, I would opt for the 26-year-old midfielder of Bayern Munich and England, every day of the week. The last 48 hours of debate about the decision of the national team not to take the knee offers more than enough reasoning.
The despicable racist abuse aimed at Stanway’s teammate Jess Carter by low life attention seekers from the social media Muras was the background of the team’s decision.
Farage was too busy making cynical political capital of this news – castigating the mere existence of the ‘crazy gesture’ – to extend the mildest sympathy to a besieged young woman.
It was Stanway, in the stadium where England will play a semi -final against Italy on Tuesday evening, which gave the eloquent voice to the fact that taking the knee seems pointless when the intellectually disputed cries type their racing. “It doesn’t do what we want it to do,” she said. “We need more change.”
She’s right. Taking the knee once had a value. It increased consciousness. It led to discussion. It brought talking about racism and the broader abuse that comes down to those who play sport in the light. It gave players the confidence to contribute to a discussion, to call the abuse, to describe their experience. Ten years ago this was unknown in sport. Football, with his annoying inverted snobism, dismantled those who even ventured into such a territory. Not anymore.
But how many players today can actually mention the meaning – the actual distraction – of the gesture?
The lion ribbons have decided to take the knee for Tuesday’s semi -final against Italy
Lioness Jess Carter said she was leaving social media after receiving a ‘a lot of hatred’
Reform leader Nigel Farage looked forward to the decision, and labeled the knee a ‘crazy gesture’ and labeled
It was 2016 when Colin Kaepernick decided to kneel while playing the American national anthem for an NFL match for the season, in protest against a series of police killings on unarmed black civilians in that country. The younger members of the English team were still students in primary school at the time.
A gesture only affects as long as it provokes thinking, an agreement, letting people sit up and watch. When it becomes routine, an incidental part of the pre-match ritual, it loses that value and it becomes part of the lethargy and complacency with which it was primarily designed to kick. This is what taking the knee has become. A self -confirming moment, designed to make us feel a little better about a problem that remains a spot on sport and the wider public atmosphere.
Some have depicted the gesture as Marxist – a form of expression for a malignant movement that the police wanted to discourage – and brought it into our cultural wars. Hence Farage’s saliva this week about the decision of the English team. Once the chance of the chance.
For me it has been none of those things and propagators of such theories would do well to investigate the facts about the story of Kaepernick on the field of San Francisco 49ers Levi on a September afternoon nine years ago. He knelt, instead of, by the way, an attempt to maintain respect for the American army while that national anthem played.
A little fundamental research would certainly have helped the former Foreign Minister Dominic Raab, who once said when attacking the gesture that he thought it was taken from ‘Game of Thrones’.
Stanway and her teammates have no special idea about which gesture, if present, could follow instead of the person who passes them. And it is not up to them to find one.
“It doesn’t do what we want it to do,” said midfielder Georgia Stanway. ‘We need more change’
NFL star Colin Kaepernick decided to kneel while playing the national anthem in 2018
Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho were subject to racist abuse after Euro 2020
The most powerful challenge of sport for the haters in recent years comes from individual players. Who could forget the Instagram post of Marcus Rashford after the penalty miss in the European Championship final of 2021 had brought the same hatred to him, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho that Carter is now experiencing. “I will never apologize for who I am,” Rashford stated in that powerful statement of identity and myself.
We can only hope that there will be much more like he will be, because there is no equipment evidence that we are expelling the hatred whose more optimistic thought was taking the knee to the past. “It is really sad that we have to be busy,” said Stanway’s manager Sarina Wiegman, who took the broader view of her defender’s experience. ‘It is ridiculous and disgusting what happens. And that goes beyond football. ‘
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