Gareth Southgate says he will not be drawn into a virtue-signalling contest at the World Cup and can handle any criticism that comes his way.
The Football Association scrapped plans for captain Harry Kane to wear a OneLove strip against Iran after FIFA threatened the countries with sporting sanctions.
Southgate feared Kane, or even his entire squad, may have been prevented from taking the field against Iran if they had ignored FIFA’s threat.
The pressure is now on England to come up with a new form of protest, especially after Germany’s players responded to FIFA’s intervention by covering their mouths before their loss to Japan. If they do, it will be in contrast to Wales, who said they would not protest against their Iran game, with manager Rob Page suggesting the Germans will wish in retrospect they had focused entirely on football.
England’s players will discuss the matter ahead of Friday night’s game against the United States, but Southgate insisted he and his team will not be forced to perform an act of virtue to appease their critics.
“We can get caught up in things that don’t matter”
“I noticed the Danish coach talking after their game and he felt he didn’t have the capacity to handle the football,” Southgate said. “I think that’s the risk we all run. I am quite happy with our position and I think we should be confident in what we are defending. What we think we can influence.
“There was a plan [before Iran], we failed to perform. What do we do now? Are we all trying to outdo each other with a gesture that might actually be… however we do it, it probably won’t be enough. It can probably be criticized.
“Do we make a better video than Australia? That would be hard because it was brilliantly done. Should we come up with a better gesture than Germany?
“We want to support the LGBTQ community in particular and recognize that a lot of those people are not here with us and we wanted them here with us.
“But we could also rush into doing things that are not good and don’t really make any difference and take a lot of time and energy away from where we need to be now.”
“I understand it will be uncomfortable for people because I can be criticised, the captain has been criticised, the organization will be criticised. I’m probably more used to it than everyone else, to be honest, so it has less of an effect on me.
“I’m very comfortable with what I stand for and how I deal with people every day of my life is more important than a statement that may or may not go well.
“I’m going to try to cover things for the next, hopefully, 30 years of my life, and of course there’s a point here where you hope to highlight things, but the fact that we’re still talking about it does.” So we don’t refuse to answer questions, but I think we have to be careful not to be seen as trying to do something.
“We want to make people aware of how we feel”
England will continue to kneel before the start of every World Cup match. Defender John Stones echoed Southgate’s view that they would not copy other teams’ protests.
“I am sure of our meeting tonight [Thursday], we’re going to talk about things like that,” Stones said. “We don’t want to get caught up in what other people are doing.
“We want to stay true to our own values, but at the same time we want to make things heard and understand how we feel. We want to tell everyone’s opinion the right way. I feel like right now it’s really hard to do that without breaking people’s rules or whatever. There’s a really fine line in all of this and so far we’ve tried to stick to our values and what we believe in as a team to make sure we don’t get pushed around.
“We are so privileged to be able to make an impact in this way. It’s literally small talk about something tonight and we all have the same take on it that we do almost every time, so I think we’ll take it from there and see what happens tomorrow [Friday].”
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