The Poppy, The Rainbow and the Taking of the Knee

As we all took to our seats around the Hawthorns on November 6th for West Brom’s game against Hull City, players stood sombre as a piper sounded The Last Post. Silence fell across the usually noisy and raucous crowd as we stopped, together, to pay our respects in remembrance.

I bowed my head slightly and in doing so, I noticed two women a few rows in front of me comforting each other. They were both really emotional. It touched me deeply as I realised that, in this big collective act of remembering, they were having an experience that was incredibly personal. I imagined a lost son at war, or a recently passed dad who had served. These two fans, feeling held and seen in their grief by their community.

As the silence ended, the players took the knee. The ground broke out in applause. We got on with what we all pretend we’re all there for, and watched some football.

I’d watched my first live football match in far too long back in May 2021. Successive lockdowns really taught us that there is no football without fans. After over a year of a very different kind of silence, fans were allowed back in to their home clubs in reduced numbers and I sobbed my way down Halfords Lane to watch West Brom play West Ham on a floodlit Tuesday night.

Something didn’t feel right. I realised as I faced towards the Smethwick for an attack on goal that it was the complete absence of the West Ham away end. I was frantically texting my good friend Katie, a huge West Ham fan, every bit of it. I missed her presence in this shared experience. Just as there’s no football without fans, I realised there’s no football without the other fans too. There’s no football without difference.

For those who aren’t into football, it can be hard to understand the glee that arises from absolutely rinsing the club 10 minutes down the road. “Why can’t we all get along?”, the refrain goes. Yet you only have to see the sheer grins on the faces of two opposing fans slagging each other’s respective clubs off to realise something very different is going on there. There is joy in celebrating difference, especially when that difference is really about something shared deeply in common.

It’s through football, and nothing else in my entire political life, that I’ve started to learn to think and see people as fully people. Not as the political faction they are. Not as the poppy on their jacket. Not even as the crest on their chest. As joyful, complex, entire human beings where nothing can be taken for granted about who they are based on the colour of their skin, or the stripes on their shirt.

Football puts this huge elastic band around us all and brings us together to see the same point. That’s not even metaphorical. We pour into our club on a match day, 10s of thousands of us for two different sides, held in this ring of stands to look at the same point at the exact same and feel collective and opposing emotions at exactly the same moment. The frustration all around me as a ball sails over the post into a group of fans feeling extreme relief that they got away with that one. The gutting silence from three quarters of the crowd as the ball slips past Sam Johnstone’s fingertips to limbs and drinks in the air and absolutely pure joy filling the air from 2,000 people in different coloured scarves to me. The ecstasy of the goal.

As we filed in once again for an icy cold night of football, I wondered what the rest of the fans were feeling about our Rainbow Laces match. The club, other WBA fan groups, twitter accounts and good old regular fans filled their timelines with a sea of rainbows, trans flags and hearts. Something that brings tears to my eyes when I think of the progress this is over such a small number of years. For the vast majority - maybe indifference? But what a delight indifference can be. Nowhere else so powerfully puts paid to the idea that we as a people are about division and hatred than football stands.

I saw myself reflected back by my club last night. Players in rainbow t-shirts, rainbow corner flags, a huge digital screen saying everybody is welcome at the Hawthorns. Rainbows waving across the stadium. We stood together, excitedly willing Darnell Furlong to get an assist from one of his rainbow towels, claiming it as our own if so. Deeply personal moments. A small pocket of joy, held in the collective.

There’s is no other space I can go to in my entire world where there is a welcoming home for the poppy, the rainbow and the taking of the knee. Let alone over a second’s shift. All contained within the same calendar month. Nowhere else that difference comes as part of the design. Football tells us we can even be held in opposing viewpoints yet still be together. More so, that it is in this difference that we can make meaning.