All power to the NFL knee protest

The history of sport and political protest in this country would be a slim old volume. It would feature quite a bit of Robbie Fowler, the Liverpool striker, who once lifted his shirt after scoring to reveal a Calvin Klein T-shirt which said ‘Support the Dockers’ using the ‘C’ and ‘K’ of the fashion logo. He might have been misguided — those dockers had been on strike, as they always seemed to be, and they did a fair bit to bring down (temporarily) the great city of Liverpool — but Fowler was a terrific player and an all-round good guy. He once persuaded a ref to revoke a penalty and later made an elaborate show of snorting the touchline. He also bought up more or less every bit of property in Liverpool: hence the terrace anthem, to the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine’: ‘We all live in a Robbie Fowler house…’

In general our sportsmen are discouraged from being political.