Gareth Southgate said the match against Germany on Tuesday was just another football game - like hundreds which his team members had played - and that they carried no political "baggage". He was referring to the use of such matches to revive WW2 rhetoric, among other things...
However, the England team duly "took the knee" before the match, briefly, as did the German players, thereby showing that politics - if not political baggage - cannot be divorced from any aspect of life and certainly not international sport.
Southgate boldly defended this gesture, despite coming under fire from the press, some football fans and the political right. In advance of 6 June's Romania match, he said "our players will once again take the knee as a show of solidarity with the Black community, including members of our squad who themselves continue to suffer abuse on a regular basis".
Original "kneeler", Colin Kaepernick, the American NFL quarterback, went a lot further than this. His 2016 protest against police brutality against black people was to kneel during the playing of the American national anthem - putting the whole US political system into question!
So belting out "God Save the Queen" - before a quick "kneel" - is a far cry from the meaning of Kaepernick's protest. But still, the England team's gesture is better than nothing; racism, including police racism, is very much alive and "well" in Britain today. We were reminded of this on Tuesday, when the cop who brutally killed Aston Villa footballer Dalian Atkinson, was finally sentenced to 8 years in prison.
Indeed, since racism is one of the most pernicious and divisive weapons of capitalism's class system, even the "minimal" gesture of taking the knee, as a sign of resistance against it, is worth making. Of course, the working class (including football players!) will ultimately need to go a lot further than this. All the way to the defeat and final overthrow of the class system itself. And yes, that will mean first disposing of every piece of patriotic baggage.