Former Everton managers seem to be like politicians these days when it comes to playing fast and loose with the truth and coming up with their own revisionist recollections of their tenures at Goodison Park. There was a time in the not-too-distant past that Blues fans might dread the international breaks, fearing that one of their players might talk up a potential move when away with his country and then inevitably try and claim the quotes were somehow lost in translation.
However, the current interruption in Premier League fixtures – even more frustrating because it comes after the recent fixture postponements following the Queen’s death and ahead of a six-week mid-season winter break due to the World Cup finals in Qatar – has featured not one but two ex-Blues bosses opening up to Sky Sports News to give interviews trying to explain just why their highly-paid assignments working for Farhad Moshiri were supposedly so difficult. First Rafael Benitez claimed that because of his past employment at local rivals Liverpool “maybe I couldn’t make some decisions” yet the director of football Marcel Brands; star players James Rodriguez and Lucas Digne plus director of medical services Danny Donachie all left during his six-month tenure while he was able to splash out almost £30million on two new full-backs Vitalii Mykolenko and Nathan Patterson in the January transfer window.
Ultimately it was just one win in his last 13 Premier League matches in charge, a sequence that included nine defeats and which chairman Bill Kenwright would later describe as “unacceptably disappointing” that would end the Spaniard’s Everton reign rather than previous Anfield connections but with the 62-year-old perhaps now feeling that his batteries are suitably recharged and a few employment opportunities might be coming up to provide what could be one last shot at the big time, such vague, intangible platitudes have replaced those once famous Benitez facts and help mask the reality that a Blues side that hadn’t finished below 12 th over the previous 17 seasons, looked to be plunging headfirst towards the Championship on his watch. During his struggles at Everton, Benitez declared: “I am certain we will improve in the second part of the season,” regularly trotting out the mantra that’s what his sides tended to do, but a careful examination of his career record shows that’s not necessarily accurate as during his 17 full seasons in European football, there were been seven seasons in which his teams accumulated more points in the first half, eight that produced more in the second half and two that finished level.
