Perhaps I expected too much. When I went along in the protest against Carlton and Granada last Friday, I really wanted it to be good. I wanted to feel involved in something significant, and to feel I was playing my part in fighting an enemy of our game. I was ready to be inspired.
Ho hum. It wasn't quite like that. What I got instead was an hour or two of standing on the other side of the road from an anonymous, heavily scaffolded office block in South London. It felt pointless. It felt futile. The post-protest pub consensus, certainly amongst the Claret contingent, was that it had been a waste of time. Shame.
I desperately wanted the protest - organised, if that's the right word, by the Football League - to have an impact. We must never forget that a very straightforward injustice lies at the heart of this. A year ago Carlton and Granada were happy to court League football and strike a deal. League clubs stuck by the deal to the letter, even though it meant moving matches to strange times and days. Unfortunately it didn't work out, so rather than honour their deal, or even attempt to renegotiate, two huge companies simply washed their hands of their responsibilities and walked away. They wound up ITV Digital and declared the mess they had made was nothing to do with them. This is wrong, and they should pay.
So far, so simple, but after going on the protest, I couldn't see how it was going to help in bringing pressure on Carlton and Granada to fulfil their obligations. Sadly, it was a pretty forlorn occasion, and there's no point in pretending otherwise.
The protest the League concocted for us showed a lack of imagination, and was characterised throughout by familiar top-down condescension towards supporters. We weren't involved in the planning of the protest and our ideas on how to make it effective were not sought. We were simply told where to go on what day. The League's way of deciding which clubs would protest on which days was simplistic too: they simply took an alphabetical list and divided it into sixes. Given a bit more thought, we might have got a nice balance of big and small clubs, and guaranteed that at least one club present would bring some numbers each day. Simple enough, you would have thought.
The League might have gathered our ideas on ways of making the protest livelier and more visual, and therefore more appealing to the public and media, who were surely key targets. As we stood there holding our dismal placards, we thought of footballs to kick around, airhorns to sound and banners to unfurl.
Instead we were all handed these mystifying placards. All the same placard: so much for visual variety. You may have seen it. It featured a bad cartoon of the heads of Carlton and Granada, and posed the question 'The threat to English football?' Quite what the public were supposed to make of this was anyone's guess. They wouldn't have had the faintest idea who the people pictured on the placard were. And have you ever gone on a demo where you hold up a sign asking a question? A small point, perhaps, but surely the aim is to make a simple, effective statement. No one ever marched to say 'No to student loans?' or 'Stuff the poll tax?'
The organisation left something to be desired too. The process leading up to it was filled with confusion. First we were told the 10th, then the 12th. Consistently we were told to meet at a hotel in Kensington, even though this is some distance from the South Bank, where we had been told we would demonstrate. A couple of days before, this changed, and we were to go straight to the South Bank. But we had already extensively advertised the hotel as a meeting point, so there we had to go. You might have expected someone from the League to be there to redirect other supporters who'd followed their instructions? Err, no. Picking up a Brighton fan who'd been similarly misled en route, we scurried to the South Bank under our own steam.
There was no one significant from the League at the protest. Naturally when I complained to one person about the arrangements, it was nothing to do with him. A couple of people from the League stood detached at one side, handing out placards as we arrived, and at the end, exchanging them for patronising letters from the League thanking us for coming.
I didn't know what we were doing there, standing across a quite busy road from an office block. We had early on established that Granada's Chairman wasn't there. I wondered what we were doing shouting at secretaries and delivery men, or urging the many passing taxi drivers to sound their horns. We handed out some flyers and educated a few pedestrians about the campaign, but frankly, if you want to appeal to members of the public, you don't do it on a street on the South Bank.
And this is the key question, really. Who was this protest aimed at - Carlton and Granada, or the public? Were we trying to embarrass the two companies, or were we trying to influence public opinion against them? If the former, the protests didn't work. It would have been better to personalise it and take it to the doubtless swanky houses of the top men. What would the neighbours say!
If we were trying to influence the public, so that they in turn could put pressure on Carlton and Granada, we were in the wrong place. I think this is what we should have been doing. Far better something huge and eye catching, like a rally in Trafalgar Square, or at least a march in central London. (Our 'static protest' was a bit too static.) One of our lot succeeded in handing out more fliers on a walk between pubs in the rush hour City than the League had given away on Upper Ground. And why were we divided into units of six anyway? Imagine the sight of 72 sets of supporters (or 71, if we accept that no one supports the pariah club of Franchise FC) brought together in a big, vocal demonstration, all of us in our different colours, all holding banners and joining in chants. That would have made the point that football's majority is involved in this fight, and that the hundreds of thousands of ITV customers who go to League matches every week are angry. If our strength is in numbers, why not use that strength?
That would have given the media something to report on other than Delia Smith, and delivered a simple, understandable message. It might have taken more imagination, and a greater willingness to involve football supporters, as opposed to just telling them what to do.
I can only speak for the Burnley supporters present, but we all felt that our protest had served no purpose. We had doubts beforehand, but we pushed them to one side and tried to rally support. Though we tried our best, those doubts were vindicated. Unfortunately we came away convinced that, although our cause is right, the League cannot be trusted to pursue it. The protests were a nice idea, perhaps, but they were poorly and half-heartedly executed. They clearly haven't even captured the imagination of football supporters (so what hope of swaying public opinion?) As I understood it five clubs were supposed to be represented on the South Bank, but there was only Brighton, Cambridge and us - and one alphabetically inconvenient Stoke supporter. There weren't many of any of us. Still, those of us who were there had shown enough willing to take a day off work to get rained on. And it's a shame, given the willingness to do something we showed last Friday, that our enthusiasm was wasted. What a pity that I am left feeling we couldn't fully play our part in the fight.
My aim is not to undermine the protest, if it is still going on, but it would be wrong to bury our heads in the sand and pretend it is being successful. If the League has not done everything possible to turn the screw on Carlton and Granada, then it has let football down. I am afraid that if the League comes out of this with nothing, there will have to be recriminations. I will be convinced that they and we could have done much more. Sadly, it's hard to have much confidence in the Football League.
It is important that we still do all we can to pressure and shame Carlton and Granada into a settlement. Think about writing to your MP - Peter Pike says he hasn't got the expected deluge of letters. Write to Carlton and Granada, and to Tessa Jowell at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (the government only takes an interest when England play Brazil). Send in one of the League's protest cards, poor effort though they are. Continue to boycott sports events on ITV, turn off the adverts, and put pressure on their main advertisers. You could, for example, write to Coca Cola about their sponsorship of the 'Premiership' programme. Well, it's a suggestion.
Just don't expect imagination, inspiration or even organisation from the Football League.
