Fifa 1 – England 0

England have backed down in the ludicrous standoff with Fifa over the plan for captain Harry Kane to wear a ‘One Love’ armband – to show solidarity with gay community of Qatar – in today’s opening fixture against Iran. The move would have defied the governing body’s rules on acceptable on field attire. Faced with the threat of an instant yellow card for Kane, which, if repeated in the second game would have kept him out of the third, England blinked. 

This absurd little episode ought not to detain us for long, except that it is revealing as it gives us a fairly accurate gauge of the true force of Gareth Southgate and his squad of itinerant social justice warriors’ principles. England weren’t being threatened with expulsion from the tournament, but the inconvenience of potentially losing their star striker in the third game was enough to provoke a hasty retreat. England care about the LBGT community, oh yes. But not that much.

It’s all rather pathetic and makes you wonder how much time has been spent in England’s preparations on devising and choreographing their micro-protests ­– and how much on training and strategy for the considerable sporting challenges ahead. And what the armband protest was supposed to achieve, other than enabling the England squad to claim they had done something to protest the treatment of gay people in Qatar is a mystery.

Fatigue with this sort of thing was a leitmotif of Gianni Infantino’s impassioned, freewheeling press conference on Saturday. Much of what he said was risible, but some will have shared a modicum of sympathy with his exasperation at the constant carping and holier-than-thou posturing from, mainly, Europe’s footballing elite. Now he has a measure of revenge.

As has been said endless times – usually in the comments section of articles that carefully avoid this obvious conclusion – is that if the England squad and its administrative staff are so appalled by conditions in Qatar, the only meaningful protest would have been withdrawal from the tournament. It should have happened years ago. And on the question of timing, does anyone remember significant protest from England when Qatar was bidding for the World Cup? Or did the cultural gripes only begin after they won (and England lost)?

At least one player saw this coming. French goalkeeper Hugo Lloris has said that the time has long passed when any opposition to Qatar’s hosting would have been effective, and that the best thing to do now was get on with the job at hand: playing football. Lloris refused to join the armband protest and was consequently hammered from the usual quarters.

This is unfair. In the pampered, indolent West it rarely requires much courage to protest and it rarely provokes serious consequences. But sometimes not protesting, especially when it puts you at odds with fashionable opinion back home and opens you up to mischaracterisation and abuse, is the more courageous form of action. Lloris’s views were entirely rational and fair, and he was brave to speak out.

Perhaps he felt that the armband protest, much like the taking of the knee, was facile. Have the countries competing in the upcoming World Cup not realized that Qatar is a Muslim country? And are they not aware that homosexuality is explicitly condemned in the Quran and the Hadith? Therefore, to protest the Quran’s laws against homosexuality is not, as those so doing seem to imagine, an indictment of one country, but of a whole religion. Is that what was intended?

There are 69 countries in the world with laws against homosexuality. Only 11 (including Qatar) prescribe the death penalty as a potential punishment. But if that is the key point of difficulty it is worth noting that Human Rights Watch along with Amnesty International, have declared that there was no evidence that anyone has actually been executed for homosexuality. It is doubtful the England team did the hard research before mounting their high horse. More likely they were trying to have their cake and eat it, reaping the benefit of playing in a tournament they affect to disapprove of while trying to maintain the moral high ground. They hoped FIFA would wear it, but they gambled and lost.

Now they have been forced to bend the knee to FIFA, could they please stand up and focus on the football?