sport news GRAEME SOUNESS: Everton are a desperate, broken club - their plight is a ... trends now
It’s the sheer volume of coverage about Everton, a desperate and broken football club, which has resonated most with me this week.
If this were just another bottom-half Premier League side in the mire, there would have been some discussion and debate. But nothing on the scale we’ve seen. Maybe it’s a back-handed compliment, but the reams of analysis and hours of talk are a reminder that Everton are one of the great clubs of British football. That what has been unfolding at Goodison Park is a national football calamity.
You might be surprised to find me saying that, given I spent six of the best years of my life at the other end of Stanley Park. But Everton have always been a club that resonate for me.
Everton are in a dire state with the club's demise having been covered in depth this week
Perhaps that’s because they were the very first English football club I visited. The Edinburgh Schoolboys team I’d been picked for were to play Liverpool Schoolboys at Goodison in 1967 but after we travelled down the game was called off because the rain had waterlogged the pitch. A friend of mine, Eric Carruthers, who later played for Hearts, and I decided to go and look at Goodison and Anfield because they were so close to each other.
We got a bus out there from our hotel near Lime Street and when we showed up at Goodison and told our story, some friendly Scouser let us in. We walked up the tunnel and onto the pitch. They were trying to protect it, rather than have a couple of schoolkids wandering around, but what an impression that place made on me as a 14-year-old.
When I went to play there with Middlesbrough, five or so years later, they’d not long completed the first three-tier stand in Britain. It’s dated now, but it took your breath away back them. The picture I’m trying to paint here is of a serious football club, with passionate supporters to match.
Everton are paying the price for poor recruitment decisions over the past five years
Everton owner Farhad Moshiri, left, and chairman Bill Kenwright, right, have come under fire
I arrived to live and work in Liverpool in 1978 and they were tough days. There was economic struggle and deep unemployment. It was raw. Football was their form of self-expression. A way of defying those who wrote the place off. People talk about football cities but that place and Glasgow are the ultimate ones for me.
Of course, Everton have discovered in the painful past five years that the one thing you have to get right above all else in football is recruitment. They’ve had a couple of good managers - people who have done very well elsewhere in football - but it’s been the classic case of a wealthy man, waltzing in, thinking he knows best and not listening.
Farhad Moshiri, like some other owners currently in our game, thought: ‘This game’s easy. I know about football.’ Foolish, lazy, complacent thinking, from an individual who has made so much money that he thinks that he, rather than proper football people, has got all the answers. He’s taking bad advice and it’s turned into a farce for the club and its supporters.
Moshiri has taken bad advice leading to a football calamity at one of the country's great clubs
Former Leeds manager Marcelo Bielsa turned down the chance to take charge at Everton
Moshiri decided that it was Marcelo Bielsa he wanted as his next manager and that one concerned me, until Bielsa took one look at it and decided it wasn’t for him in mid-season.
You could justifiably say that Bielsa turned Championship players into Premier League players at Leeds but he implemented a kamikaze football which, though very entertaining, was doomed to take them back down into the Championship before he left.
