YES, POPPIES ARE POLITICAL... THIS DECISION MAY HAUNT FIFA

GERMANY will be wearing poppy armbands at Wembley tonight, too. Reinhard Grindel, the federation chief executive, made the announcement this week. ‘Poppies are about remembering the kind of values that were kicked to the ground in two World Wars but are cherished by football,’ he said. ‘Respect, tolerance and humanity.’ Well, yes and no. A poppy can mean what you wish it to mean, this being a free country, but to the majority here it is an act of remembrance to those who fell in two World Wars. It is about the people, specifically, as much as any abstract concept. And from here it may get complicated. For what if a German player, speaking honestly — or maybe simply upset on still hearing Ten German Bombers despite a best effort to appear respectful — said his poppy was equally an act of remembrance for a fallen relative, a great-grandfather say, who died fighting for his country in an age when he really had no choice? FIFA resisted this for so long because there are all manner of remembrance days and not all of the bad guys think they were the bad guys, either. The Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo commemorates Japan’s war dead, including 14 souls regarded by the Allies as Class A war criminals. Members of Japan’s cabinet visited there as recently as August 15, 2014; the Prime Minister visited on December 26, 2013. Grindel said poppies were not ‘political propaganda’ but that is only half right, too. It is impossible to separate acts of remembrance from the geopolitical history of a nation or race. Iran were fined £37,000 by FIFA a year ago because fans at a match with South Korea in Tehran were asked to mark Tasu’a by wearing black and replacing football chants with holy songs. Tasu’a is the day before Ashura, one of the most significant events in the Shi’a Muslim calendar. It translates as ‘day of remembrance’. So we will get our poppies, but Iran will be able to mark Ashura, and what if Japan played a game on August 6 and wished to acknowledge what has been commemorated as A-Bomb Day in Hiroshima since 1947? Once poppies are divorced from the political, so are a great many things.