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Racism & the Prince: Was Kevin-Prince Boateng right to refuse to play?

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Image for Racism & the Prince: Was Kevin-Prince Boateng right to refuse to play?

While I never tend to write about a single particular event, instead usually spending several days (or weeks) writing about a broader topic as a whole, I have decided for the first time to write an impromptu article about something that has just happened.Now, you don’t need me to tell you about the prominence of racism that still remains within football: it clearly still remains an issue which, although attempts to tackle it have been made, still blights the beautiful game.

Anyone who is a football fan will know that it is still a serious problem, and anyone who fails to see it as an issue is simply naïve. But in the last half hour, stories have emerged of the latest ugly head of racism to have reared, and so I wanted to give my opinion.

If you haven’t already heard the story, I will briefly summarise it. As preparation for the second half of the Serie A season (Italy is one of many European countries that have a winter break), giants AC Milan travelled to lowly Pro Patria, a Lombardy based team in the fourth tier of Italian football. In the 26th minute, having suffered racist abuse from a small section of the crowd, Kevin-Prince Boateng picked up the ball and kicked it into his perpetrators, before removing his shirt and walking the diagonal of the pitch to the changing rooms (applauding the rest of the spectators, it must be said). With both sets of players and officials following, the match was called off.

The amount of respect I have for this man is huge. Why should anyone continue to do their job if they are hurled such vile abuse? While other incidents have occurred in the past, matches are always continued, with racist claims coming to the forefront at the end of the game and subsequently dealt with (although many will argue that to say they are ‘dealt with’ is perhaps not actually true…). Boateng walking off will have made a statement to everyone involved in world football; racism will not be accepted. Without the players, there is no game, and so FIFA need to step up and work harder in an attempt to eradicate the stain that racism is causing on the game.

You could see from the match that the respect for the Ghanaian’s actions was vast; not only did the players and officials support his walk off, but the crowd, bar the racist minority, applauded the decision before booing the section who had ruined the game.

Now, some of you reading this may think that walking off isn’t the answer; if every player who gets abuse thrown at them during a game decides to walk off, then it is rare that we will ever see a match completed to the end again. But it is a statement; it has no doubt caught the eye of the footballing world and will become a talking point, urging the powers at be to do something to put an end to these dreadful incidents.

Of course, whether or not they will do anything is a different matter; along with Suarez and Terry’s recent racism cases, the England-Serbia under 21 match was marred with it, and yet it still appears little has been done since. But for a player to completely postpone a match? This is a big issue. Surely Sepp and Michel can’t afford for this to become a regular occurrence?

What happens if a player walks off in the Champions League, or at the World Cup? Oh, how their reputations will crumble… Yes; I am being sarcastic. Their reputations are already in tatters, on British shores at least. And racism shouldn’t be dealt with simply as a reason to win an election; it should be dealt with because it needs to be outright.

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