It is evident that some individuals employed by Everton still harbour warm and fuzzy feelings. Not enough to give Sean Dyche a word of thanks among the 76 they used to announce his sacking, granted, but beating hearts do exist. Proof of life has been supplied.
In the first instance, we are focusing less on the decision to reunite with David Moyes and more on one of the sentimental souls he will oversee. That being the nameless player who ‘had a pop’ at Darren Ferguson on Thursday night.
There’s a modicum of nuance to be factored in here. A recognition that Peterborough United’s manager had given a few nods and winks that one of his lads, Tyler Young, might get a run-out against his old man Ashley.
But much as we all like a spot of romance in the FA Cup, pragmatism usually wins. So when Ferguson realised his side wasn’t in for a pasting, his appetite for trivia faded – he suddenly didn’t fancy the idea of sending on an 18-year-old midfielder with 27 minutes of first-team experience.
Bit of a kill-joy, and it didn’t save the game, but his call to look beyond ‘charity’, as he put it, was sensible. Most would even say professional.
But not the player who felt sufficiently aggrieved to whine at Ferguson and whose milky instincts gave too much away about the personalities at Everton.
David Moyes has returned to Everton, but it is a very different club to the one he left in 2013
Everton have won just three league games this season and are in another relegation battle
Sean Dyche had the stuffing knocked out of him during his two-year reign at Goodison Park
No doubt Ferguson will find a way to live with his disapproval. Just as Moyes must find a way to fix those lost boys at Everton, a once-great club that is nowadays only ever a step or two removed from its last brain fart. Where even a rare win can line itself with a daft embarrassment.
So good luck to Moyes, an excellent manager who returns to a place he knows well, that he sculpted brilliantly, but will struggle to recognise on arrival. If he has been on a journey up and down mountains since he left in 2013 as the chosen one for Manchester United, then ‘the people’s club’ of his memory has simply fallen off a cliff. Romance? It’s the notion that they will get together at opposite ends of his managerial career and make it right again.
But what a mess he will find. The Everton of today isn’t the same image of competency he remembers. Today’s Everton beat the fight out of Dyche across 98 weeks under Farhad Moshiri and three in the company of the Friedkin Group. They strangled him, hollowed out one of the game’s great scrappers, much like the club burnt through Carlo Ancelotti, Rafa Benitez, Ronald Koeman, Sam Allardyce, Frank Lampard, Roberto Martinez and Marco Silva in the past 12 years.
It is a club whose financial blunders tied both hands behind Dyche’s back and pummelled him with the sense that staying up was never enough. Dodge the dung we throw at your face, manage the penalties we acquire, but make sure you trip the light fantastic as you do – it somehow became that kind of place and, in significant numbers, that kind of crowd, too.
But where would Everton be without Dyche? How many other managers would have kept those players up in those two seasons with those circumstances and sanctions?
We shouldn’t be excessively revisionist about the above – Dyche’s football was horribly ugly, and this season the team dipped beneath the sum of its parts. His race was run.
But let’s talk about class and what seems to have carried over from the Moshiri regime to the Friedkin Group – even West Ham found it in themselves to thank Julen Lopetegui for less. The bluntness of Everton’s statement on Thursday was astonishing in its lack of gratitude.
We can comfortably reduce that to an observation about thin niceties. Substantially stranger is that Everton’s preferred candidates were as far apart in playing style as Moyes and Graham Potter, who they flirted with until he chose West Ham.
That points to a selection committee unsure of what it wanted, what it needed and where they are on the curve towards progress. They will say Moyes was the first choice all along, and yet he and Dyche are far more closely aligned in approach than Moyes is to Potter.
Survival is plainly the immediate priority now and Moyes should deliver it – he is a proven quantity in these battles and one who, crucially, would have credit in the bank locally. Dyche never did and that can weigh a tonne at Goodison Park.
But no one will be easily convinced by the positioning of this as a long-term plan. The contract will say 2027 but it smells like a stop-gap, a rescue mission, a popular face to keep the grumbling down, allowing the Friedkin Group to kick the can down the road until a sexier option presents himself to their wonderful new stadium. It feels like a compromise, a delay to whatever their vision is, and another layer of red tape in a complex rebuild. All of which says nothing for Moyes’s own words a fortnight ago, when he said he didn’t want his next job one spent ‘fighting relegation’. I tend to think he warranted those options and I’m tempted to wonder about where this recoupling featured on his list.
Everton have become a mess, with no one able to get the best out of the team over the past decade
I believe that Moyes is now facing one of toughest assignments of his managerial career
My hope would be for Moyes to prove all of that wrong and to be resistant to the rot and dire recruitment – problems which dominated the Moshiri era and could take years for the new owners to correct.
Moyes is smart enough to walk through those doors with eyes open, but, again, he might not believe much of what he sees. Same as those rather handy names in management who arrived with optimism and were swallowed by a sink hole.
Of them, Ancelotti, for one, peaked with 10th and that was when the club had money to spend.
Will Moyes be able to get any higher so soon after Everton were hammered by the profit and sustainability rules? When so many of his squad are best sold as scrap? When so many of the weak links that caused the mess, on the field and off it, are still there?
It won’t just be the romantics out there who want to see him pull it off, to see him excel beyond the parameters of a temporary solution. But it would be exceptionally charitable to see it as anything less than one of the toughest assignments of his career.
Why I can’t wait to see Murray and Djokovic team up
Novak Djokovic begins his challenge for the Australian Open on Monday and in his corner will be Andy Murray.
While some amusement might come when Djokovic throws a tantrum at the coaching box, the intrigue will be derived from whether the Scot can reverse the effects of time on a 37-year-old who has slipped to world No 7.
Murray can’t teach him much about strokes, but as a reader of the game, as a tactician who found ways to mitigate stronger, fitter, more technically gifted opposition, there was no one better. It is one of the most exciting collaborations in sport.
Former rivals Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic teaming up is an exciting prospect
It will be intriguing to see how Murray reacts if Djokovic throws a tantrum at his coaching box
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Brighton penalty highlights football’s complications
I was at Brighton’s match with Arsenal when William Saliba conceded a penalty for an accidental clash of heads with Joao Pedro.
My first instinct was no penalty. My second was that if an identical collision happened between lower limbs, then of course it should be.
My third, after seeing the incident dissected two dozen times in a couple of days of replays, was to wonder: why did football have to make itself so appallingly complicated?
