Les Ferdinand and Wilfried Zaha had it right about that gimmick.
Ferdinand said, ‘The taking of the knee has reached a point of “good PR” but little more than that. The message has been lost. It is now not dissimilar to a fancy hashtag or a nice pin badge’.
Zaha said, ‘I'm not going to take the knee, I'm not going to wear Black Lives Matter on the back of my shirt because it feels like it's a target. We're isolating ourselves, we're trying to say that we're equal but we're isolating ourselves with these things that aren't even working anyway, so that's my stand on it. I feel like we should stand tall and now I don't really tend to speak on racism and stuff like that because I'm not here just to tick boxes’.
It had run its course a few years ago. A load of blokes kneeling down on some grass before a sporting event isn’t going to stop racists in their tracks and think ‘oh wow, I think I’m going to stop being a racist now I’ve seen that’. And we see that in action when a racist does something to show they’re racist because they are racist… and the gimmick hasn’t got through to the racist and hasn’t stopped it from happening, despite the line ‘there’s no room for racism’.