If sport is war by other means, football is always getting found out on the frontline. Even as the annual poppy row rumbles on – this year’s incarnation concerning Fifa’s ban on shirt poppies for England v Scotland on Friday – José Mourinho is presenting white feathers to two of his defenders. Chris Smalling and Luke Shaw have fallen short in a variety of martial metaphors: they haven’t put their bodies on the line, they haven’t played “at any cost”, they are cowards by another name. The Manchester United manager will have enjoyed the timing of his gesture. As a long-term resident of the Premier League, Mourinho will be finely attuned to the annual poppy row, its implications and its possibilities for exploitation.
It’s one of the endlessly implied questions of the modern age, isn’t it: would footballers die bravely for us? If it came to it, would they lay down their lives for club and country like bally heroes? And more than that: would they thank us for the opportunity to do so? Could they have scored on a wet Christmas Day away to the Germans in no man’s land? The answer, always, is an infuriated NO. No, they wouldn’t and no they couldn’t, because they may have all the money and all the cars and all the women but they haven’t got the right stuff any more. Modern footballers couldn’t hack it in a war. Quite why they’d need to is never made clear. I mean, they play for Manchester City or Chelsea in 2016 – why on earth does anyone give a shit about how they’d have taken a lungful of mustard gas? I think the traditional counter-argument is that there is a principle of bravery and commitment here but there really isn’t. If you honestly think there is any continuum between war and Super Sunday, you’ve terminally invalided yourself out of the argument.
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