This day, a month ago, was what will go down in Betis history as 15-J. Not just el quince de junio. 15-J. And I was there.
A little bit of backstory. In the days following the fateful last game of the season against Valladolid (on May 31st), a loose conglomeration of supporters' groups decided it was time to protest against the way the club was being managed. (It´s important to note that though this might have been triggered by relegation, it wasn't about that. Why would it be? We're in the Liga Adelante! Sounds kinda progressive, right?)
So, over the subsequent couple of weeks, a website was launched, posters were stuck up around town, an elegant manifesto was composed (you can read it over on the right-hand side), and an impressive list of former players, local celebrities and artistas Béticos were marshalled to offer their support. The organisers picked a date and time and said they expected 10,000 people to turn up.
An hour beforehand, I turned on the local television news and saw a fairly meagre crowd gathering in the shadow of Seville cathedral and wondered whether the whole thing was going to be an embarrassment.
But a funny thing happened on the 30-minute walk from my flat to the centre of town. The closer I got, the more green and white I saw. By the time I´d reached the Plaza del Salvador we'd already become a throng. As we passed along Calle Placentines I felt like one of a host of verdiblanco spiders being sucked towards a particularly thirsty plughole. And then I reached the Plaza Virgen de los Reyes... Lordy. Miss. Clawdy.
In the end, the march proved more or less impossible. The idea was to process around the back of the cathedral, through the Plaza del Triunfo and down the Avenida de la Constitución to Plaza Nueva, a distance of around 400 yards. But the whole area - the entire centre of Seville - was so swamped with loopy Béticos in every shade of green imaginable that you just had to get to Plaza Nueva whichever way you could. How one could know how many people were there is anyone´s guess, but the local press eventually settled on a figure of 60,000.
It would be almost impossible to describe the atmosphere of that evening, to capture the barely believable mix of society that was there, the sheer number of home-made banners, the songs, the charm, the passion, the montón of fun had by all. The Seville newspapers - like this and this - still have galleries of pictures up, but my absolute favourites were these I found on Flickr. I don´t know the photographer, but he captured the evening perfectly.
Of course, a month later and nothing has changed - yet. The club is still in the same ownership, and the majority shareholder has shown no particular inclination to hand over the reins. It seems every new announcement - from the price of shirts to the overvaluation of very average players - is an embarrassment. The web-based "television channel" is a joke, the new club spokesman is a buffoon, and so on and so forth.
But we´ll always have 15-J.
Top 5 chants of 15-J
5. "¡Sevilla es verdiblanco!"
4. "Arriba, arriba Betis, Arriba Betis campeón..."
3. "¡Ponte las botas, Gordillo ponte las botas!"
2. "Lorenzo, Lorenzo, Lorenzo, Lorenzo, Lorenzo Serra Ferrer..." (And he wasn´t even there.)
1. "¡Lopera vete ya!" What else?
