Absentee landlords
Moments after thousands of Evertonians poured onto the Goodison Park pitch on the final whistle, the mood in the stadium turned from relief to anger with chants of 'sack the board'.
Everton, who have proudly played a record 120 seasons of top flight football, some 11 more than their nearest rivals Aston Villa and the only founder members of both the Football League in 1888 and Premier League in 1992 to be ever-presents in the latter, had come within a hair’s breadth of dropping down into the second tier of the English game for the first time since 1951 when King Charles III’s grandfather George VI was still on the throne.
The magnitude of this lengthy timespan was epitomised by the hold up at the top of the stairs as this correspondent made his way to the press box. The queue in front patiently waited as one venerable Evertonian, who looked to be in his 90s, carefully negotiated his pathway.
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Here was a man in his twilight years, one of the very few inside the ground to be old enough to remember a time when in the prime of his life, the Blues were for a brief spell, not among the elite but here he was, putting in the effort to offer his support to the club he loves when they most needed it. Contrast such scenes with the absenteeism of those supposedly running Everton.
Owner Farhad Moshiri has spoken about being a mere custodian of this football institution but he of course hasn’t attended a game at Goodison Park since the 5-2 capitulation against Watford back on October 23, 2021 while after what was billed as security reasons, the club’s board of directors have stayed away for all of the fixtures under Sean Dyche. Not being in the stadium on matchdays is just the tip of the iceberg though for those within Everton’s corridors of powerm though.
Regardless of whether the team stayed up or not, this had already been the least-successful season in the club’s history in terms of an equivalent points total. That failure goes far beyond just football tactics and is indicative of those mistakes that Moshiri admitted to last summer when he said: “We have not always spent significant amounts of money wisely.” While Dyche himself declared in his post-match press conference: “We’re not performing like a big club.”
Shaping up
Another damning indictment of Everton’s flawed recruitment strategy – or seeming lack of one – was their need to line up for their most-important game in a generation without their main striker or any recognised full-backs.
Much has rightly been made of Everton’s attacking woes given that along with less than a point per game this season (36) they also had less than a goal (34) a game. After going into the campaign without a recognised striker after Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s injury just days before the big kick-off, they then finished it without their No.9 after he was withdrawn in first-half stoppage time at Wolverhampton Wanderers some eight days earlier.
It’s only a couple of years since the Blues No.9 netted 21 goals for them in all competitions but in a season that had more stops than starts for him, he got just two in 17 here, with just one coming from open play. That’s clearly nowhere near enough and even after missing the best part of the first three months under Dyche to get himself what the manager described as being “properly fit”, a promising comeback in the run-in was ultimately curtailed.
With Everton unable to depend upon Calvert-Lewin, they splashed out £15million on a chalk and cheese alternative Neal Maupay, who had been a reasonably effective performer in the Premier League at previous employers Brighton & Hove Albion but has been deployed woefully on Merseyside, resulting in a tally, like Calvert-Lewin, of just a single goal from open play, in 29 outings this term. During the Blues’ jaunt to Australia during the World Cup break, we were told that director of football Kevin Thelwell was staying back in the UK to work on new signings, namely a couple of attacking reinforcements, but instead they were the only club in the survival dogfight not to strengthen their squad in the January transfer window.
The question marks don’t just surround the players that Everton potentially missed out on though but those they did bring in. Despite having the likes of Leighton Baines and Ashley Cole to learn from during his first year in English football, Vitalii Mykolenko has hardly been a glowing success but his absence through injury over the last two games of the season has forced Dyche to reshape his team because of a lack of alternatives.
The only other left-back at the club, Ruben Vinagre, on loan from Sporting CP, is also sidelined through injury but despite Thelwell knowing him from his time at Wolves,the Portuguese player has been largely anonymous for the Blues having not featured in the Premier League since last August. Given that those ahead of him, not just Mykolenko but the likes of Ben Godfrey and Mason Holgate, have all toiled in the position at various times, you wonder just how unconvincing he’s been within a patchwork quilt of a squad that has a surfeit of options in some areas but a chronic lack of depth in others.
Almost sold down the river
While Evertonians are rightly proud of their club’s illustrious history, for far too long they’ve been forced to look backwards instead of forwards and the hope is that their move to a new stadium will enable them to anticipate a brighter future ahead.
The switch to their 52,888 capacity home at Bramley-Moore Dock which will enable the Blues to play in front of their biggest ever average crowds is a once-in-a-lifetime event that, along with the supporters’ poignant farewell to Goodison Park, the first purpose-built football ground in England, should be a cause for great celebration. It’s therefore disgusting that such a scenario has been played against the backdrop of fear that what should be the last full season at ‘The Grand Old Lady’ an arena that has hosted more top-flight matches than any other, could have been spent in the Championship.
That threat has now been eradicated, albeit at the 11th hour, but as Dyche admitted, there are still tough times ahead and serious reality checks need to be heeded for Everton not to be in this position again… what did we all say last year? Those loyal but long-suffering supporters who have followed the city’s senior club in thin and thinner of late were out in force to roar their team over the line again and such were the levels of noise emanating from the ground that their roars could be heard across the water on the other side of the Mersey by those attending Battle of the Atlantic commemorations, which makes you wonder just how loud they could be when they relocate to the waterfront.
That event marked what is hailed as this country’s “finest hour” but this – for all the relief – was Everton at their lowest ebb. Better times just have to lie ahead but to do so, major changes are obviously required.
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