AN CITY BRING THE BANANAS BACK
City fans have descended upon Anfield armed with giant plastic bananas, a tradition rooted in the club’s previous era of turbulence, some four decades ago. The inflatable fruit is a symbol of defiance and of ownership of the charges against them. Here’s the back story...
In n the 1980s, the once proud club fell on hard times, yo-yo’ing between the first and second tiers of English Football.
To acknowledge the surreal nature of “big club” in a lower league, City fans - who still attended in massive numbers - brought plastic inflatable bananas to the stahim. A way to acknowledge and own the situation. A visual symbol of, “You can’t say anything about us because we’re saying it about ourselves.”
While the origins of the banana remain a slight mystery, it is believed that a chant switching the obscure journeyman attacker Imre Varadi’s name to “Imre Banana” may have been the catalyst.
Today, playing for the first time since being found guilty of 114 charges against them, the fans have brought back the bananas as a call back to their roots. Yet another act of refusing to go quietly.
