Football gets it completely wrong.

Within two minutes of the Queen’s death being announced on Thursday, I posted the following on the City messageboard I use most;-

I”’ve no time for Royalty, but I always said that if we had to have a Monarch, she was a pretty good one.

It’s strange, she’s been there all of my life – don’t really know what to think now she’s gone, but I hope she rests in peace, she deserves that.”

That was an immediate reaction to the news, since then I’ve grown heartily sick of the wall to wall coverage that we’ve had from the mainstream media about the Queen’s death. It’s always the same with any sort of royal event. There’s never an acknowledgment that the fawning, reverential coverage may not reflect what a significant proportion of the country may be feeling – in this case, the BBC especially may be fearful of what sort of reaction any change of tone may provoke from the sections of the print media, all of which were more than willing to hammer Queen Elizabeth and her family twenty five years ago in the wake of Princess Diana’s death.

Anyway, I digress, back to the Queen and the reaction to her death. That comment I made on Thursday evening still holds true – I have an issue with the institution the Queen represented, but none really with her and now I would just like a return to some sort of normality in life.

There was a chance of that with Cardiff City due to entertain Hull City today, but that’s been taken away now by what I believe to be a shocking and ludicrous decision by the sport’s authorities to, effectively, ban the game over this weekend – bafflingly though, it appears that it’s okay to play some forms of junior football in some parts of the UK.

Now, my reaction there may read as being extreme, but allow me to develop my argument. For a start, let’s be clear about this, the UK Government’s guidance for the period of mourning which had been declared following the Queen’s death advises that cancelling fixtures was not obligatory but up to individual sports (taken from stories like this one ). So, the Government, and, by implication, the Royal Family have no objection to sport events taking place during the period of mourning.

As a result of this, various other sports have decided to continue as normal this weekend. For example, I’ll be able to watch the England v South Africa test cricket match at the Oval today as that’s being played over the next three days following a show of respect with the cancellation of yesterday’s play. Similarly, the BMW PGA tournament will restart today as a fifty four hole event, while horse racing (the sport closest to the Queen’s heart) will resume tomorrow with the running of the St. Leger. Bizarrely, the Bristol v Bath rugby game which was postponed last night as a mark of respect will be able to go ahead today as part of a full Premiership fixture list because the banning of football means that the Bristol City match scheduled for Ashton Gate is not being played now! Other examples include the Great Northern Run going ahead as planned and full programmes of Rugby League and Ice Hockey (meaning there will be some professional sport going ahead in Cardiff this weekend) fixtures proceeding as normal.

Football though decided to jump in before all of these sports bar horse racing I believe by unilaterally calling the weekend’s games off (and there’s no confirmation yet that matches scheduled for midweek in the days ahead and then the following weekend’s games will proceed either). This goes directly against the most recent precedent set by a death of a Monarch.

While I appreciate it’s a long time ago now, when the Queen’s father, King George the sixth died on 6 February 1952 (that was a Wednesday), football was still played three days later on the Saturday with City losing 4-2 to Sheffield Wednesday in the old Division Two at Hillsborough in front of a crowd of 42,867, which was about fifteen hundred up on Wednesday’s average home crowd that season. So, on the face of it, there was little or no “protest vote” from fans who decided not to attend because playing football a few days after the King’s death was “disrespectful”.

Yet, the message sent out by the current football authorities is suggestive of a line of thinking that their predecessors from seventy years ago were being disrespectful by not cancelling fixtures. Indeed, their decision implies that the sports which are going ahead as normal are being disrespectful despite the official guidance appearing to indicate that this is not so.

Although I understand the decision of Royal Mail workers and the RMT to cancel their latest strikes in the light of the Queen’s passing, it is ridiculous that, on one hand, you have one set of employees being told they have to go to work and another, albeit far richer, set of employees being told they can’t work because the Queen has died!

I was around in the fifties, but I’m too young to remember anything about them now. However, from what I’ve read and seen of that decade, I find it very hard to believe that anti Monarchy feelings were stronger then than they are now, so why the feeling, which appears to exist in the top echelons in football at least, that they were getting it wrong in the fifties?

I can’t answer that, but I can point to a modern development which appears to come from a belief that sometimes a minute’s silence to mark the passing of an individual or group of people is not sufficient, it has to be two minutes. What’s all that about? One minute is perfectly adequate and has been since the first official instance of this method of remembrance in 1912, yet some modern thinking appears to believe that this is not enough – why?

Now, to bring this around to Cardiff City to finish, I have heard it said, that not playing this weekend is probably a good thing because of the reaction of some fans to any minute (or two) of silence before the game. I would argue that, on the contrary, putting things off (there’s bound to be a period of silence pre game whenever City play again) makes it more likely that it will not be observed by all.

On a purely selfish note as well, City will not now have a home game in September and there have been examples on messageboards of exiled supporters who were making trips to Cardiff to watch a rare home game for them who are going to be out of pocket now because of this pointless postponement (I’m sure stories like that have been repeated at clubs up and down the land)- I just hope that those responsible who are in elected positions pay for it come their next election time.