BRIAN VINER: Everton's magic seems so irretrievably lost
Everton are among the few genuine giants of English football, writes lifelong supporter BRIAN VINER ahead of their final-day battle for survival. So now that the magic seems so irretrievably lost, fans are hurt, bewildered and angry
- Everton face Bournemouth on Sunday in a vital clash at the bottom of the table
- If they lose or draw, they could be in danger of falling our of the Premier League
- For Everton fans, the magic at Goodison Park seems to be gone forever
For all the uncertainties swirling around Sunday’s final round of Premier League matches, there is one thing you can bet your replica shirt on: at around 6.30pm an outside broadcast director will look at the available camera shots and select one of a young fan sobbing inconsolably, probably next to a stricken parent.
And it could well be that the image comes from one of the English game’s most venerable citadels, Goodison Park.
For as long as I can remember I have watched those final-day pictures of kids crying, my sympathy for their pain lasting only as long as they’re on screen. But the distraught little poppets were never in Everton blue.
They could have been, following the Wimbledon game in 1993-94 and again against Coventry City in 1997-98, but they weren’t. And despite last season’s collywobbles, we were safe by the final day. But now things are looking as sticky for the Toffees as they have for 25 years.
If Everton lose or even draw against Bournemouth on Sunday and Leicester beat West Ham, then the team I have passionately supported for more than 50 years will drop into English football’s second tier for the first time since long before I was born.
Everton’s Premier League status will be decided on the final day of the 2022-2023 season
For a fanbase raised on success, the fall has been a hard one to take and feels irreversible
At Elland Road, Leeds could also beat an out-of-sorts Tottenham to relegate us.
If we win, however, then it doesn’t matter what Leicester and Leeds do. My non-Evertonian friends are reassuring. ‘Of course you’ll beat them,’ they say. ‘They have nothing to play for.’ The more waspish ones add: ‘If you can’t beat Bournemouth at home then you don’t deserve to stay up.’
Fair point. But the Cherries have already hammered us 7-1 on aggregate this season, in the Premier League and Carabao Cup.
Moreover, Sean Dyche’s team could yet take the field on Sunday without a recognised right back, left back or centre forward, a sign not just of the injuries that have bedevilled us this season, but much more agonisingly, an indictment of a hopelessly dysfunctional recruitment strategy, if ‘strategy’ is the right word, since the British-Iranian billionaire Farhad Moshiri bought into the club in 2016.
I’ll leave it to others to deconstruct the reasons why Moshiri’s tenure has been such a disaster, despite the mighty new stadium now rising in the Liverpool docklands.
It is ironic that we punched well above our weight when we had comparative buttons, especially in the David Moyes years, yet have punched so feebly below our weight since we’ve been extravagantly bankrolled by Moshiri (and his much richer erstwhile business associate, Alisher Usmanov).
By way of full disclosure, I should add here that the long-serving Everton chairman Bill Kenwright has been a good friend for well over 20 years, so I’m not about to join in with the savage kicking he gets daily from fans on social media.
I understand why they do it, though, and I’m sure he does, too. Everton, by any historical measure, are among the few genuine giants of English football. We have played more top-flight games than any other club, we featured in the first televised game, had the first three-tier stand, were the first to install dugouts and undersoil heating, the list goes on and on.
Everton were among the best English sides in the 1980s when they won two Division One titles
I realise this smacks of the pipe-smoking Englishman in tweeds reminiscing about the great days of empire, but you only need to look back into the middle-distance, to the mid-1980s, to recall an Everton team who swept all before them. Southall, Ratcliffe, Reid, Bracewell, Sheedy, Sharp and of course Howard Kendall, names for us to conjure with.
So now that the magic seems so irretrievably lost, fans are hurt, bewildered and angry. I am, too. I arrived as an Evertonian when a different magic shimmered over Goodison, woven by Alan Ball, Colin Harvey and that man Kendall, the so-called Holy Trinity.
I grew up in Southport, not much more than 15 miles up the road, though forever destined to be labelled a ‘woolly-back’ by proper Scousers, apparently after the tradition of belittling the Lancastrians who delivered coal to the city with sheep fleeces strapped to their backs.
Woolly-back or not, I fell headlong in love with Everton in the summer of 1970. I was eight years old. It was just after the Toffees had won the League title and just before the World Cup in Mexico sent my friends and me to the recreation ground night after night pretending to be Pele, Jairzinho, Rivelino, Boninsegna, Muller and occasionally in my case Joe Royle, who wasn’t in Mexico but had an unbeatable name.
Choosing Everton felt like backing the right horse, something I knew a bit about because my dad had been a failed bookmaker and that was something his customers generally did.
I mention my dad because, although he was from Liverpool and had been a presumably impressionable 12 years old when Dixie Dean scored 60 league goals in the 1927-28 season (beat that, Erling Haaland!), he didn’t support Everton. He didn’t follow the other lot, either.
He was a horseracing man and boxing nut, who was deeply suspicious of big football crowds and refused to let me go to Goodison, much as I begged. Then in February 1976, when I was 14, he abruptly died. It was a traumatic time to lose a father, but on the upside I gained a season-ticket.
For the next few years I followed my team home and away, bunking off school to make interminable rain-swept journeys to evening games in places like Middlesbrough and Grimsby (for an infamous League Cup defeat) that felt like crossing the Russian steppes. Admittedly, it no longer looked like I had backed a winner.
Sean Dyche’s side need to beat Bournemouth on Sunday to ensure they stay in the top flight
After the early promise of that 1969-70 title Evertonians spent most of the next decade looking resentfully across Stanley Park. But on the other hand, I was there, lifted off my feet for what seemed like minutes on end by the joyous surge of the sweaty multitudes on the Gwladys Street terraces, when we beat Liverpool 1-0 on an unseasonably sunny October day in 1978.
I guess lots of football fans have memories like that. It’s not just Evertonians who think we are special, or as we like to put it, ‘born, not manufactured’. But the incomparable Ball did say that ‘once Everton have touched you, nothing will ever be the same’, and other former players down the years have concurred.
Maybe it is the connection to the city, what Moyes was driving at when, getting right up the noses of Liverpool fans, he declared it the ‘People’s Club’. Maybe it is Goodison itself, not just known to us as the Old Lady but truly the only stadium I know with a personality.
Or maybe it’s the wit (currently manifest as gallows humour), the kind which yielded a cheeky name for the merchandise shop in the Liverpool One shopping centre, so that its address will forever be Everton Two, Liverpool One.
Whatever it is, my sons feel it, too. They’re 28 and 24 now, one born two weeks before we last won a trophy, the 1995 FA Cup, the other born shortly after we nicked that 1-1 draw against Coventry to stay up on goal difference. They have never known the euphoria of winning titles, like I have, and for that matter they have never lived anywhere near the Old Lady.
But they are as devoted as I am, and aged 14 and 11 they were both there with me when Phil Jagielka clinched the penalty shootout win against Manchester United in the 2009 FA Cup semi-final at Wembley, to send us into raptures and make me forget any vague general rule I might have had about not wanting my sons to be lifted up and tightly hugged by grown-up strangers.
It was only a semi-final, and we lost the Cup to Chelsea a few weeks later, but these days we Evertonians must grab our treasurable memories however we can. We might have one more coming on Sunday, if another last-day nailbiter goes our way.
Win, lose or draw, though, the bigger question is where Everton go next? I don’t mean the Premier League or the Championship, to Manchester United or Rotherham United, I mean existentially.
If they lose, Leicester and Leeds can overtake by winning games against West Ham and Spurs
I’m not qualified to analyse what the financial consequences of relegation could mean with the new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock still incomplete, still less to unpick the threat of sanctions should an independent commission decide we broke Financial Fair Play rules.
But I am long enough in the tooth to know that, in football, nothing lasts for ever. Good times pass, and so do bad times.
Years ago, I used to feel a kind of kinship with Manchester City fans. United were top dogs in the city, just as Liverpool were, but they were sleeping giants, as we were. Well, they woke up and roared, whereas we’re snoring louder than ever.
But whatever becomes of us on Sunday, nothing will dampen my ardour for one of the great loves of my life.
And I will continue to shop for Christmas presents at Everton Two, Liverpool One, as bittersweet as it will be if next season, may the football gods forbid, there is no Merseyside derby.
Brian Viner is the author of Looking For The Toffees: In Search of the Heroes of Everton
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