Brown Nose
Well-Known Member
I've become quite fed up with this display now. I know this will appear quite disrespectful, but it really is becoming difficult to play along.
Leicester City started all this. We were the first club to make a big deal of the fixture closest to Remembrance Day. We invented the poppy on the shirt, the last post being played, and so on. A decade ago it was a novelty of ours. Then, every other club had to copy it until it became impossible not to. Now clubs have armed forces recruiting teams attend these matches eager to attract young fans.
And then it got to the stage where even someone like James McClean has been vilified every year for, quite understandably, not wanting to be part of it. Weirdly, we make many players of nationalities whose families we killed in conflicts stand there solumnly while we dress people up in poppy costumes or hold silly pieces of paper up.
We also even made a big thing of a helicopter delivering the match ball. A few years ago, I posted on here that this would end in tears one year with something going wrong with the helicopter. I foresaw a mechanical failure meaning the helicopter would be stuck on the pitch and the match would have to be abandoned. For obvious reasons, we've thankfully now stopped this silly display.
I'm fortunate enough to have known my great grandfather. He was a lovely man that fought in both world wars. I also knew my two grandfathers who both fought in the second world war. Remembrance for all of them was a quiet, solitary, thing. It was an emotional time to think of their friends and colleagues that fought alongside them and never returned home. When I choose to observe the silence at 11am tomorrow, I'll be thinking of them. The people who had no choice in the matter, who were asked to fight for their country and did.
But when did it become something else? Nobody alive today fought in the first world war. To be alive and have fought in the second world war, you'd have to be over 90. SInce when are we clapping kids in military uniforms and people who've chosen to make a career from it? Why not have an annual parade of nurses or quantity surveyors?
There are now hundreds of military charities hoarding billions of pounds. The Royal British Legion being one of the worst culprits. They routinely redefine their purpose in order to justify their existence. The people they were formed to support are almost all long gone. They have enough money to make any remaining world war veterans wildly rich. So the RBL reinvent themselves and introduce multiple different poppies and multiple different reasons for their continuing. It's a nonsense. That charity should be winding down because it has served its purpose, not ramping up encouraging shaming of anyone not wearing one of their motifs.
As I held my sheet of paper up yesterday, I wondered whether I was the only person there that wasn't comfortable with it all. Thankfully not. There is a very good thread from the Chief Football Writer of the Independent saying much the same thing:
Leicester City started all this. We were the first club to make a big deal of the fixture closest to Remembrance Day. We invented the poppy on the shirt, the last post being played, and so on. A decade ago it was a novelty of ours. Then, every other club had to copy it until it became impossible not to. Now clubs have armed forces recruiting teams attend these matches eager to attract young fans.
And then it got to the stage where even someone like James McClean has been vilified every year for, quite understandably, not wanting to be part of it. Weirdly, we make many players of nationalities whose families we killed in conflicts stand there solumnly while we dress people up in poppy costumes or hold silly pieces of paper up.
We also even made a big thing of a helicopter delivering the match ball. A few years ago, I posted on here that this would end in tears one year with something going wrong with the helicopter. I foresaw a mechanical failure meaning the helicopter would be stuck on the pitch and the match would have to be abandoned. For obvious reasons, we've thankfully now stopped this silly display.
I'm fortunate enough to have known my great grandfather. He was a lovely man that fought in both world wars. I also knew my two grandfathers who both fought in the second world war. Remembrance for all of them was a quiet, solitary, thing. It was an emotional time to think of their friends and colleagues that fought alongside them and never returned home. When I choose to observe the silence at 11am tomorrow, I'll be thinking of them. The people who had no choice in the matter, who were asked to fight for their country and did.
But when did it become something else? Nobody alive today fought in the first world war. To be alive and have fought in the second world war, you'd have to be over 90. SInce when are we clapping kids in military uniforms and people who've chosen to make a career from it? Why not have an annual parade of nurses or quantity surveyors?
There are now hundreds of military charities hoarding billions of pounds. The Royal British Legion being one of the worst culprits. They routinely redefine their purpose in order to justify their existence. The people they were formed to support are almost all long gone. They have enough money to make any remaining world war veterans wildly rich. So the RBL reinvent themselves and introduce multiple different poppies and multiple different reasons for their continuing. It's a nonsense. That charity should be winding down because it has served its purpose, not ramping up encouraging shaming of anyone not wearing one of their motifs.
As I held my sheet of paper up yesterday, I wondered whether I was the only person there that wasn't comfortable with it all. Thankfully not. There is a very good thread from the Chief Football Writer of the Independent saying much the same thing:
