Next year, let's just ignore James McClean's attention seeking rudeness
Every year, as October ends, the media runs stories about a mediocre player in football’s second tier who has decided not to wear a poppy. This annual ritual accords a degree of political agency to the rudeness of James McClean, the Londonderry footballer who plays for the Republic of Ireland and Stoke City.
McClean has been embroiled in controversy almost constantly, since he left his home-town club Derry City to play football in England. During the process of negotiating that transfer, he withdrew from the Northern Ireland international team, which had nurtured him through its underage ranks, to defect to the Republic of Ireland.
In 2013, the player’s then club, Sunderland, was forced to ban him from Twitter after he named a pro-IRA ballad, “The Broad Black Brimmer”, as his favourite song. “When men claim Ireland’s freedom,” the lyrics go, “the one they’ll choose to lead them will wear the broad black brimmer of the IRA.” The post betrayed dubious musical taste, as well as unpleasant attitudes to terrorism.
McClean’s lack of circumspection on social media led to clashes with his managers at international level, Giovanni Trapattoni and Martin O’Neill. When Trapattoni was in charge of the Republic’s team, McClean vented his frustration at not being included in the starting eleven for a match in Kazakhstan. He was back on more familiar territory when O’Neill reprimanded him for describing the Belfast Telegraph as a “bitter sectarian paper” whose journalists were “bigots”.
McClean’s obnoxious attitude was displayed most ostentatiously in the summer of 2015, after he joined West Bromwich Albion and competed in a pre-season friendly in the United States.
The game’s organisers played God Save the Queen and displayed a St George’s cross prior to the match, to honour their guests. McClean decided to turn his back on the flag and the rest of his team, while the anthem was sounding. This display of bad manners was a particular low, given that all he needed to do was stand quietly, show a little respect and not draw attention to himself.
The winger is best known for consistently refusing to wear team shirts that bear the poppy emblem, in the lead up to Remembrance Day. The same dreary controversy has played out annually at Sunderland, Wigan Athletic, West Bromwich Albion and, now, his current club, Stoke City. Each year, the coverage is accompanied by an identical debate that rages on social media and elsewhere.
Defenders of the player point out that it is a personal decision whether to wear the poppy or not. That may be true, but it’s worth bearing in mind that, when a football club has the symbol embroidered or woven into its shirt, it is intended primarily as an act of collective remembrance. Football clubs are first and foremost community organisations, rooted in the localities they represent and the values of their supporters.
“McClean is an interesting case study of how unreconstructed bigotries and hatreds are being passed on to younger generations, despite decades of the ‘peace process’ in Northern Ireland.”
This year Remembrance Sunday will be particularly poignant, as it coincides with the centenary of the armistice of 11 November 1918, when the guns fell silent in the First World War. Stoke City players served in that conflict and six of them were killed. The club will mark the occasion alongside local Staffordshire regiments of the British Army, whose history and traditions are equally closely linked with the community.
If a player has difficulties, consistent difficulties, with the communal ethos of his various clubs, particularly when a sense of tradition and place are central to those organisations, why on earth is he comfortable being employed by them and getting paid an enormous salary? At best, it is hypocrisy on an epic scale.
Ultimately, that’s a matter for the clubs to discuss internally. It’s their business whether they make the emblems displayed on kit a matter of personal choice. Presumably, if that is their policy, they communicate it to all their playing staff. If, instead, an exception is being made for McClean, then he has been treated with remarkable tolerance throughout his career.
The player’s confrontational conduct is often excused by reference to the player’s difficult ‘upbringing’. He was raised in the staunchly republican Creggan area of Derry. Yet McClean was born in 1989, which means he cannot possibly remember the worst of the Troubles. Indeed, he’s an interesting case study of how unreconstructed bigotries and hatreds are being passed on to younger generations, despite decades of the ‘peace process’ in Northern Ireland.
Just like anybody else in society, footballers are entitled to their views on remembrance and politics. It’s perfectly possible, though, to espouse these principles without being rude, aggressive and antagonistic.
James McClean is not some sort of political crusader. He’s a very bad mannered boy. It’s too late this year, but next November, if he’s still playing in England, can we for once just ignore McClean’s attention seeking antics?
