The deluge came earlier this week, with a bitterly appropriate sense of timing. As the precursor to the approaching Storm Darragh emptied its load over the north-west of England, video footage showed the stands and stairways of Everton’s new stadium cascading with rainwater, filling and flooding the concourses beneath.
Which – in an ideal world – is probably not the image you want people to conjure up when they think of your new £760m waterfront stadium, built on a floodplain, surrounded on three sides by the River Mersey and expected to withstand decades of climate change and devastating sea level rises.
