On bended knee

Every so often sport bursts its banks, spills from its usual courses and goes flooding incontinently onto the news pages. This year we’ve already had Australian cricketers doing unspeakable things with sand-paper, Gareth Southgate’s World Cup waistcoat and the return of Serena Williams to Wimbledon a few months after an emergency caesarean.

And now we have Colin Kaepernick. He is currently an unemployed quarterback of America’s National Football League. He famously — heroically if you like — refused to stand for the pre-game national anthem, in protest against social injustice and police treatment of black people. Many other footballers followed suit. Last season at an NFL game in London between the Baltimore Ravens and Jacksonville Jaguars, around two dozen players ‘took a knee’ during the American anthem.