FIFA ban poppies from England kits.

[Gibbo]

Fifa will not allow England players to wear poppies against Spain, despite Government plea

Fifa have rejected a Government request that England and Wales be allowed to wear commemorative poppies in this weekend's friendlies, claiming the move would "jeopardise the neutrality of football."

The world governing body have always maintained that wearing poppies on shirts would contravene their rules governing what is allowed on shirts, but sports minister Hugh Robertson called them reconsider.

"I am writing to you in support of requests from The Football Association and The Football Association of Wales to ask you to consider allowing the England and Wales football teams to wear poppies on their shirts for Saturday’s international matches, taking place a day before Remembrance Sunday," Robertson's said in a letter to Jerome Valcke, Fifa's general secretary.

"We fully understand, and respect, Fifa’s rules on its member nations not adorning their shirts with ‘commercial’, ‘political’, or ‘religious’ symbols or messages. The FA and FAW do not intend to contravene these rules. However, the British public feel very strongly about this issue which is seen as an act of national remembrance to commemorate those who gave their lives in the service of their country."

However, a Fifa statement issued in response said: "We regret to inform you that accepting such initiatives would open the door to similar initiatives from all over the world, jeopardising the neutrality of football. Therefore, we confirm herewith that the suggested embroidery on the match shirt cannot be authorised.

"There are a variety of options where The FA can continue supporting the cause of Remembrance. One of them already was approved by FIFA, the Period of Silence."
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Robertson's plea came after the FA wrote to Fifa asking them to change their decision, and Fifa vice-president Jim Boyce offered his support.

Boyce said: "Personally I think there has to be a bit of common sense used when requests like this come in. Armistice Day is a very important day in the FA calendar, as it is with other associations, and I don't think it would offend anybody to have a poppy on the shirts.

"I am not involved in the decision and I do understand there have to be rules.

"But as this is a special request from a member of Fifa and is not of a political nature I believe that common sense should prevail and that it should be looked at in a different light."


Fifa have allowed a minute's silence to be held before the sell-out game, for the England players to wear poppies on their training kit at Wembley on Friday, and to stand for the traditional two minutes' silence to mark the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11 month on Friday.

Fifa's rules prevent anything of a political nature being worn on shirts and although the organisation does not regard poppies as political, they are concerned it would open the door to countries wanting to wear various different emblems on their shirts, some of which would be overtly political.

FA general secretary Alex Horne made a fresh request to Fifa yesterday asking them to reconsider, and is now awaiting a response.

Don't see the problem with it myself.

[IN_RAFA_WE_TRUST]

You can't always have it your own way. The English don't half bitch about things.

[Kenneth]

Storm in a tabloid teacup imo.

[ChesterDave]

The rule is apparently that you can not have a political message on a shirt.

The Kick it Out, and anti racism campaigns are political messages, aren't they?

I know FIFA are known for consistency but..

[Neil Young]

And do these messages appear on international shirts?

[Gibbo]

Not the ones John Terry is wearing, his say Kick 'em in

[Nicey]

Its FIFA rules, plain and simple I don't see what the problem is. Someone on 606 suggested Have them wear Poppee Armbands and auction them off for charity afterwards, which I think is a great Idea

[Arn]

Its FIFA rules, plain and simple I don't see what the problem is. Someone on 606 suggested Have them wear Poppee Armbands and auction them off for charity afterwards, which I think is a great Idea

So what about Barcelona and UNICEF? Clearly political.

[ChesterDave]

Would be funny to see them call FIFA's bluff and just wear them anyway. It aint primary school and nobody is going to make them plays in pants and skins if they had no other kit available.

Same for 'allowing' a minutes silence to be held. WTF they going to do if they conduct one anyway. Get a FIFA delegate to shout at the top of voice throughout that it hasnt been officially sanctioned?

[BringbackBiscan]

So what about Barcelona and UNICEF? Clearly political.

Unicef is political?

[Fredo]

Would be funny to see them call FIFA's bluff and just wear them anyway. It aint primary school and nobody is going to make them plays in pants and skins if they had no other kit available.

Same for 'allowing' a minutes silence to be held. WTF they going to do if they conduct one anyway. Get a FIFA delegate to shout at the top of voice throughout that it hasnt been officially sanctioned?

What's the world got to do with the Poppy appeal in the UK? Not everybody went to war you know.

[Ben_Itez]

An alternative viewpoint from Robert Fisk in the Independent:

Robert Fisk: Do those who flaunt the poppy on their lapels know that they mock the war dead?

I turned on the television in my Damascus hotel room to witness a dreary sight: all the boys and girls of BBC World wearing their little poppies again.

Bright red they were, with that particularly silly green leaf out of the top – it was never part of the original Lady Haig appeal – and not one dared to appear on screen without it. Do these pathetic men and women know how they mock the dead? I trust that Jon Snow has maintained his dignity by not wearing it.

Now I've mentioned my Dad too many times in The Independent. He died almost 20 years ago so, after today, I think it's time he was allowed to rest in peace, and that readers should in future be spared his sometimes bald wisdom. This is the last time he will make an appearance. But he had strong views about wearing the poppy. He was a soldier of the Great War, Battle of Arras 1918 – often called the Third Battle of the Somme – and the liberation of Cambrai, along with many troops from Canada. The Kaiser Wilhelm's army had charitably set the whole place on fire and he was appalled by the scorched earth policy of the retreating Germans. But of course, year after year, he would go along to the local cenotaph in Birkenhead, and later in Maidstone, where I was born 28 years after the end of his Great War, and he always wore his huge black coat, his regimental tie – 12th Battalion, the King's Liverpool Regiment – and his poppy.

In those days, it was – I recall this accurately, I think – a darker red, blood-red rather than BBC-red, larger than the sorrow-lite version I see on the BBC and without that ridiculous leaf. So my Dad would stand and I would be next to him in my Yardley Court School blazer at 10 years old and later, aged 16, in my Sutton Valence School blazer, with my very own Lady Haig poppy, its long black wire snaking through the material, sprouting from my lapel.

My Dad gave me lots of books about the Great War, so I knew about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo before I went to school – and 47 years before I stood, amid real shellfire, in the real Sarajevo and put my feet on the very pavement footprints where Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shots.

But as the years passed, old Bill Fisk became very ruminative about the Great War. He learned that Haig had lied, that he himself had fought for a world that betrayed him, that 20,000 British dead on the first day of the Somme – which he mercifully avoided because his first regiment, the Cheshires, sent him to Dublin and Cork to deal with another 1916 "problem" – was a trashing of human life. In hospital and recovering from cancer, I asked him once why the Great War was fought. "All I can tell you, fellah," he said, "was that it was a great waste." And he swept his hand from left to right. Then he stopped wearing his poppy. I asked him why, and he said that he didn't want to see "so many damn fools" wearing it – he was a provocative man and, sadly, I fell out with him in his old age. What he meant was that all kinds of people who had no idea of the suffering of the Great War – or the Second, for that matter – were now ostentatiously wearing a poppy for social or work-related reasons, to look patriotic and British when it suited them, to keep in with their friends and betters and employers. These people, he said to me once, had no idea what the trenches of France were like, what it felt like to have your friends die beside you and then to confront their brothers and wives and lovers and parents. At home, I still have a box of photographs of his mates, all of them killed in 1918.

So like my Dad, I stopped wearing the poppy on the week before Remembrance Day, 11 November, when on the 11th hour of the 11 month of 1918, the armistice ended the war called Great. I didn't feel I deserved to wear it and I didn't think it represented my thoughts. The original idea came, of course, from the Toronto military surgeon and poet John McCrae and was inspired by the death of his friend Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, killed on 3 May 1915. "In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row." But it's a propaganda poem, urging readers to "take up the quarrel with the foe". Bill Fisk eventually understood this and turned against it. He was right.

I've had my share of wars, and often return to the ancient Western Front. Three years ago, I was honoured to be invited to give the annual Armistice Day Western Front memorial speech at the rebuilt Cloth Hall in Ypres. The ghost of my long-dead 2nd Lieutenant Dad was, of course, in the audience. I quoted all my favourite Great War writers, along with the last words of Nurse Edith Cavell, and received, shortly afterwards, a wonderful and eloquent letter from the daughter of that fine Great War soldier Edmund Blunden. (Read his Undertones of War, if you do nothing else in life.) But I didn't wear a poppy. And I declined to lay a wreath at the Menin Gate. This was something of which I was not worthy. Instead, while they played the last post, I looked at the gravestones on the city walls.

As a young boy, I also went to Ypres with my Dad, stayed at the "Old Tom Hotel" (it is still there, on the same side of the square as the Cloth Hall) and met many other "old soldiers", all now dead. I remember that they wanted to remember their dead comrades. But above all, they wanted an end to war. But now I see these pathetic creatures with their little sand-pit poppies – I notice that our masters in the House of Commons do the same – and I despise them. Heaven be thanked that the soldiers of the Great War cannot return today to discover how their sacrifice has been turned into a fashion appendage.

[Nicey]

So what about Barcelona and UNICEF? Clearly political.

No its not really. Its a ****ing moot point this whole discussion, them are the rules, get on with it. If it really is that important to the England team and English people in general, make an Armband. What if the Germans said they wanted Swazikas on a certain day to remember the German solders who died .. Maybe the Serbian team want there special Tops ... it would open a flood gate

[Nicey]

An alternative viewpoint from Robert Fisk in the Independent:

Robert Fisk: Do those who flaunt the poppy on their lapels know that they mock the war dead?

I turned on the television in my Damascus hotel room to witness a dreary sight: all the boys and girls of BBC World wearing their little poppies again.

Bright red they were, with that particularly silly green leaf out of the top – it was never part of the original Lady Haig appeal – and not one dared to appear on screen without it. Do these pathetic men and women know how they mock the dead? I trust that Jon Snow has maintained his dignity by not wearing it.

Now I've mentioned my Dad too many times in The Independent. He died almost 20 years ago so, after today, I think it's time he was allowed to rest in peace, and that readers should in future be spared his sometimes bald wisdom. This is the last time he will make an appearance. But he had strong views about wearing the poppy. He was a soldier of the Great War, Battle of Arras 1918 – often called the Third Battle of the Somme – and the liberation of Cambrai, along with many troops from Canada. The Kaiser Wilhelm's army had charitably set the whole place on fire and he was appalled by the scorched earth policy of the retreating Germans. But of course, year after year, he would go along to the local cenotaph in Birkenhead, and later in Maidstone, where I was born 28 years after the end of his Great War, and he always wore his huge black coat, his regimental tie – 12th Battalion, the King's Liverpool Regiment – and his poppy.

In those days, it was – I recall this accurately, I think – a darker red, blood-red rather than BBC-red, larger than the sorrow-lite version I see on the BBC and without that ridiculous leaf. So my Dad would stand and I would be next to him in my Yardley Court School blazer at 10 years old and later, aged 16, in my Sutton Valence School blazer, with my very own Lady Haig poppy, its long black wire snaking through the material, sprouting from my lapel.

My Dad gave me lots of books about the Great War, so I knew about the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo before I went to school – and 47 years before I stood, amid real shellfire, in the real Sarajevo and put my feet on the very pavement footprints where Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shots.

But as the years passed, old Bill Fisk became very ruminative about the Great War. He learned that Haig had lied, that he himself had fought for a world that betrayed him, that 20,000 British dead on the first day of the Somme – which he mercifully avoided because his first regiment, the Cheshires, sent him to Dublin and Cork to deal with another 1916 "problem" – was a trashing of human life. In hospital and recovering from cancer, I asked him once why the Great War was fought. "All I can tell you, fellah," he said, "was that it was a great waste." And he swept his hand from left to right. Then he stopped wearing his poppy. I asked him why, and he said that he didn't want to see "so many damn fools" wearing it – he was a provocative man and, sadly, I fell out with him in his old age. What he meant was that all kinds of people who had no idea of the suffering of the Great War – or the Second, for that matter – were now ostentatiously wearing a poppy for social or work-related reasons, to look patriotic and British when it suited them, to keep in with their friends and betters and employers. These people, he said to me once, had no idea what the trenches of France were like, what it felt like to have your friends die beside you and then to confront their brothers and wives and lovers and parents. At home, I still have a box of photographs of his mates, all of them killed in 1918.

So like my Dad, I stopped wearing the poppy on the week before Remembrance Day, 11 November, when on the 11th hour of the 11 month of 1918, the armistice ended the war called Great. I didn't feel I deserved to wear it and I didn't think it represented my thoughts. The original idea came, of course, from the Toronto military surgeon and poet John McCrae and was inspired by the death of his friend Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, killed on 3 May 1915. "In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row." But it's a propaganda poem, urging readers to "take up the quarrel with the foe". Bill Fisk eventually understood this and turned against it. He was right.

I've had my share of wars, and often return to the ancient Western Front. Three years ago, I was honoured to be invited to give the annual Armistice Day Western Front memorial speech at the rebuilt Cloth Hall in Ypres. The ghost of my long-dead 2nd Lieutenant Dad was, of course, in the audience. I quoted all my favourite Great War writers, along with the last words of Nurse Edith Cavell, and received, shortly afterwards, a wonderful and eloquent letter from the daughter of that fine Great War soldier Edmund Blunden. (Read his Undertones of War, if you do nothing else in life.) But I didn't wear a poppy. And I declined to lay a wreath at the Menin Gate. This was something of which I was not worthy. Instead, while they played the last post, I looked at the gravestones on the city walls.

As a young boy, I also went to Ypres with my Dad, stayed at the "Old Tom Hotel" (it is still there, on the same side of the square as the Cloth Hall) and met many other "old soldiers", all now dead. I remember that they wanted to remember their dead comrades. But above all, they wanted an end to war. But now I see these pathetic creatures with their little sand-pit poppies – I notice that our masters in the House of Commons do the same – and I despise them. Heaven be thanked that the soldiers of the Great War cannot return today to discover how their sacrifice has been turned into a fashion appendage.

Superb for me its all part of War Porn, Nationalism and a form of control, I don't mean any disrespect to anyone in voicing that opinion. It seems people get caught up in the nationalistic mob like militarism that prevails in the US everyday, when these dates come around. Each to there own and I respect peoples need to commemorate, buts its not for me.

[ChesterDave]

What's the world got to do with the Poppy appeal in the UK? Not everybody went to war you know.

I wasnt aware I said they did. I wasnt aware I said the rest of the world should care. I said that if the FA want to wear it they should. See what FIFA do. If racist chating is worth the piss poor fines they hand out, I cant see them doing much to the FA