Personally, I think the magnitude of the Arena bomb is significant enough to be marked at the first football game at City's stadium since then. I would take issue with having a minute's clapping, as I think it is symbolic of the mawkish 'look at us' faux grief culture that has become a growing movement in both society and football recently. A minute's silence is a far more dignified, solemn and meaningful tribute to a devastating event that touched everyone in the city. I understand that some people argue that clapping avoids silence being interrupted, and I've been at plenty of games in the past where a silence was deliberately or unintentionally interrupted (funnily enough this usually causes other idiots to make it even worse by shouting abuse and ruining the silence in order to show how offended they are). But I've also been at many games where silences have been perfectly observed and I trust people to do the decent thing for a tragic event like this.
However, I have to say that minutes applause that appear at what seems like 50% of games these days are not only inappropriate but also crass. There should never be a minute's applause or any sort of commemoration during a match for an individual City fan. Dozens of City fans will pass away each week and their worth in life of their 'status' as a City fan should not be determined by whether they had enough social media followers to get something like that going or whether their mates were good enough on message boards to get something going.
Personally, I think all these campaigns to get minute's applause going at matches are quite selfish. If a blue who is close to me passed away and the same week I saw people clapping for some other ordinary blue who had passed away, I would be pretty angry about it. It seeks to mark some as more special than others.
On the part of those who are always keen to join in with clapping for someone or something that they are not aware of or are barely touched by, there is an unpleasant under current of mawkish 'look how I know what really matters' about the whole thing when, fundamentally, tacky 'tributes' like this are not 'what matters' at all and count for very little. There's something about football crowds around the country at present where they are almost too keen to hold 'tributes' at any possible opportunity and, persoanlly, I think it is more about the crowd and how they want to be seen than about the subjects of the tribute - who barely anyone there knows. I would ask those who are the most vocal and publicly solemn about these things to consider how often they get up off their backsides to go out of their way to attend memorial events or give up their time to make a tangible contribution to help people of famillies affected by death. Those are things that make a difference and are important. Not clapping at a football match.
As I say, I think the Arena bombing should definitely have been marked but, in general and in relation to other matters, I trust the club judge what is important enough to Manchester to be worthy of marking and they are, historically, pretty decent at that. And when the club organises something it will inevitable be done with more dignity and mean much more than some half hearted clapping.
