Everton protests are not about money, they are about hope

Fans have vented their frustration with banners and asked the players to show passion, but what will their efforts achieve?

PROTEST: Everton fans hold up banners in protest against the clubs board after the Premier League match at Goodison Park, between Everton and Southampton. Pic: Peter Byrne/PA Wire

I’ve been particularly enjoying the protest banners. Everton is a furious club right now, its fans and its ownership in open warfare, a mixture of rage and desperation and powerlessness. And yet for some reason all this anger seems to express itself in perfect, playful rhyming couplets. “Everton were magic, Kenwright is tragic.” “A football giant owned by a clown, all you’ll achieve is taking us down.” “A chairman who won’t let go, an under-qualified CEO.” 

Only Everton fans, you feel, can capture an existential cry for help with the levity of a child’s nursery rhyme. I don’t propose to analyse the metre and scansion of the Everton banners in too much detail, but on some level I wonder whether the jauntiness of the medium is a subconscious counterpoint to the opacity and obfuscation of the Everton board, with their woolly “Official Statements”, their anonymous briefings to favoured journalists, the intentionally imprecise messaging. You put out your press releases. We bring poetry.