As Everton prepare for transfer deadline day, Nigel Martyn has cautioned that even with an ambitious owner like Farhad Moshiri, the club must box clever to secure the kind of signings needed to take them to the next level.
Martyn, who played for the Blues between 2003-06, hopes that Frank Lampard’s contacts within the game can make a big difference in terms of transfer changes at the club but he admits that they find themselves in a delicate position.
His fellow former Everton goalkeeper Neville Southall was damning about the club’s recruitment earlier this month – proclaiming: “You can’t go short-term anymore. What’s the point in signing some nugget who is not going to win you the league? ” – but Martyn takes a more pragmatic approach.
Speaking courtesy of 101GreatGoals.com, he told the ECHO: “It’s so difficult. I’ve had this conversation with friends. You can have all the money in the world and your rich owner with his financial backing but the key is attracting the players that you want to bring to your club when there are so many other great clubs out there all trying to do the same.
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“There’s a pecking order across Europe over the clubs who get first pick, second pick, and Everton probably fall into a group who get the third or fourth pick.
“What you have to do is get the type of player who has the quality you need but it’s difficult to get them when they’re at the peak of their powers.
“Often it’s a case of trying to get them when they’re young and having two or three seasons of them before they move on to a bigger club which is sad to say.
“Alternatively you get a couple of seasons out of someone who has done it at the top and other teams think he might be just starting to lose his powers a little bit.
“You’re fine maintaining where you are but when you want to go forward it’s hard.”
Martyn experienced the highs and the lows with Everton, but after going from 17 th in his first season at Goodison Park to the club’s highest-ever Premier League finish of fourth the following year, he admitted that attempts to go with a more expansive approach proved tricky.
He said: “I was fairly lucky in my career that there were quite a few managers who wanted to make sure that defensively we were very solid first.
“When I moved to Everton, we were very leaky in that department and the following season David Moyes changed the formation, put five in midfield, made us difficult to break down, and we found we were nicking results while being solid defensively as well.
“You get a relative success from that but the problem is that from there you want to go on to the next stage.
“That’s what we tried to do at Everton, after finishing fourth and having signed James Beattie we thought we’d be going a little bit more attacking and going with almost two up front but you find it’s more difficult that way.
“To finish in the top six but be more defensively-minded is maybe not such a good watch but in terms of your position, you’ll finish higher up the league than if you have that ‘go for it’ mentality.”
One piece of business in the January transfer window that has Martyn scratching his head though was the decision to sell Lucas Digne to Aston Villa after his well-publicised spat with Rafa Benitez, only for the Spaniard to be dismissed just a few days later.
He said: “That was a tough gig for Rafael Benitez being a former manager of Liverpool and having the success that he did across the park.
“It was always going to be difficult and was going to go one way or the other. It was going to be absolutely unbelievable or it was never going to work and unfortunately it was the latter.
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“However, if a player falls out with the manager, you sell the player and then sack the manager two weeks later, to me that’s completely the wrong way round.
“If the manager is under that sort of pressure, you don’t sell the player, because if the manager does go, you keep one of your better players and don’t pass him on to a club who are someone we should be fighting with.”
The turmoil at Everton has spilled over into the stands with a stay-behind protest following the 1-0 defeat to Aston Villa and then an evening demonstration outside Goodison on the following Wednesday.
On both occasions, chairman Bill Kenwright was one of the senior club figures who bore the brunt of their anger – including a face-to-face exchange outside the Main Stand on the Saturday – and Martyn admits it’s something he doesn’t like to hear about.
He said: “From my time there I had a great rapport with the supporters.
“I’m sad to see Bill Kenwright’s name being dragged into that because Bill was nothing but brilliant to me and for me and you know how passionately he feels for the club.
“Any decision he makes or anything he tries to do is what he feels is best for the club and that should never be forgotten.
“He’s on the board though and he and the owner are the obvious targets for the supporters to talk to.
“Bill has always been open and would have open conversations with supporters to understand their feelings.
“I think he’s well-aware of how things are at the moment and will have been striving to make sure they appointed the right person.”
One of the few plus points this season has been the steady run of form of Jordan Pickford in Martyn’s former position with the former Sunderland man largely cutting out the kind of wild moments that sometimes dogged him in recent years.
It’s something that the 55-year-old, whose transfer from Bristol Rovers to Crystal Palace in 1989 made him English football’s first £1million goalkeeper, has picked up on as the likes of Arsenal’s Aaron Ramsdale challenge Pickford for his place in the national team ahead of the World Cup finals.
Martyn said: “I think the scrutiny that Jordan is always under is part of the job.
“Your only answer to it is your performances on any given day, you have to perform and that’s ultimately what you’re judged on.
“You’ve got to keep a clear mind and make sure your performances each week are good.
“Jordan is probably having a better season this year than he’s had for a while.
“He’s been more consistent this year and that’s something that comes as you get when you’re a little bit older. We’re going to get the best years of him now.
“He does hold the England number one jersey and it is his. He will come under pressure from other goalkeepers and that’s only right but he’s in charge of it at the moment.
“As long as he doesn’t let Gareth (Southgate) down, I think he’ll stick with him.”
