A DAY FOR REFLECTION

You think the FA have issues with the Wayne Rooney Charity Match at Wembley coming up this week, then give some thought to the game England played against Scotland in  a World Cup Qualifier in 2016. Yes, you remember that on Armistice Day the teams wore poppies on their armbands, held a minute silence inside Wembley, played The Last Post, handed out T-shirts with poppies emblazoned and showed "war" images on the stadium's screens. Well, FIFA stepped up to the mark and fined the FA £35,000 for displaying political and religious symbols at one "of their matches".
England won 3-0, so what the hell?

On the 11 November in 2006, James Cotterill a Barrow Town defender played against Bristol Rovers in an FA Cup First Round tie, at Holker Street and in the 60th minute got fed up with Sean Rigg, an opposition attacker, and slugged him with a punch that broke his jaw bone in two places. The ref missed this but the Match of the Day cameras filming did not and later showed the incident which led to a criminal prosecution for grievous bodily harm that got James four months imprisonment. This was the first event of this kind in recent history to result in imprisonment!

And on the World War issue, I read recently that Blackpool FC played the 1914-15 season against the background of the 1st WW and in August 1914 a large number of refugees from Belgium arrived in the town. As a gesture of support the club adopted the Belgian flag colours-red, black, yellow. They wore this for a year only. In 1923-4, a club director, Albert Hargreaves (you couldn't make this up), was an international referee and he did a game between the Netherlands and Belgium. So impressed was he with the Dutch "orange" shirts he persuaded his fellow directors to adopt the new colour for the Seasiders. Actually the club never referred to the colour as orange-it was always tangerine and having lapsed from this colour for a few years in 1938-9, they went back to tangerine.

If you haven't see the "Brothers in Football" TV programme shown on BT Sport last night, it's about the Corinthian Casuals, then somehow access it! and remember the brilliant section on the BBC Website about the First World War-full of wonderful detail about the way war was influenced by and itself influenced football.
Just a thought, how many EFL clubs wear "orange".