Quotes

David Moyes: "That performance was better than it has been, especially in the first half when we created good chances. We are showing signs that we are going in the right direction. I thought we might have shaded it but all credit to Middlesbrough, they came back and put us under pressure."

"That's another late goal that has hurt us. I didn't feel it was a freekick leading up to their goal, and it was a messy one to concede."

Stevie Watson: “I made a tackle on Bolo Zenden and felt first of all that it wasn’t a foul, because I won the ball. That’s fair enough, because decisions like that do go against you.Then the referee pulled me over and it looked as if he was going to book me.But when I went over to talk to him, he allowed them to take the free-kick. They got in behind me, which wouldn’t have happened because I was pulled out of position. We conceded a corner and then they scored from it.It was a strange decision to call me over and then let the play go on, I found it strange it anyway!

Hit Me With Your Lissom Shtick…….Hit me……..Hit me
By
Mickey Blue Eyes

More footy spivvery during the week led to bids and part-bids for Doug Ellis Inc. and pinkies Inc., both turned down. Apparently. At the same time, one Ken Bates, late spiv of Chelsea and hot foot to retain an FA position, currently chasing the Russian gangster for two million English pounds, also chased ownership of Sheffield Wednesday. Nobody knows what really happened because hardly any of them can speak clearly through a forked tongue lubricated with slippery PR. The ownership game is almost a replica of Great Homer Street Market during the clean up operation and just as ugly. Things can only worsen while The Melledrew Tendency exist. Unfortunately the poisoned of spirit are always with us.

Actually it would be a tragedy for our game if the pinkies sell out to someone who doesn’t support them, or who has more of an eye on his or her own place. Granada already own ten percent thereof. Our city has little enough home grown motivation or influence in any of the corridors of power in anything, football included. Whatever his faults David Moores supports his club through and through and has done his best to deliver. Better even him and his unearned millions than some yahoo barrow boy, tin-pot pissed-up pub revolutionary or grasshead, local or not. The same goes for us at Goodison Park and everyone else too.

Meanwhile, Deadly Doug told the bidders – which apparently include former player Ray Ranson and a former QPR (!) chairman – they had undervalued the club at £30 million. Of course they had. To their fans, likeable or not, Villa are as priceless as anyone else’s club. Once the basic raw material assets are relatively scientifically valued everything else is but notional. But Villa’s Melledrew Tendency are stuck in the cleft stick which captures all such half-arsed idiots. They want Ellis out but haven’t a clue who or (more appropriately) what could replace him and give them whatever it is they want. You might as well bay at the moon as bay for playing success. Ask Chelsea or Leeds. For that matter ask the current Manchester United.

Pre-match, an invitation from Kipper and co. to the Grand National pub on Westminster Road, and the new first floor “Blue Kipper Lounge.” Talk about laugh. The mind boggles at the board of directors of Blue Kipper in a deep discussion over several gallons of beer and the use of the right term, “bar,” “suite” or, erm, “lounge.” Anybody who has met the Kipper crew will know they do anything but lounge. Whatever, in yet another demonstration of the popularity of this website the new pub owner Brian invited the Kipper proletariat to establish a new drinking den for Evertonians. One can only imagine what this does to the bizarre “minds” of the envy-ridden dopes who send virused e-mails to Kipper, the ones that fail ingloriously every time through anti-virus software. No question, there are some peculiarly disturbed people out there in dire need of psychiatric help.

Knowing second-hand just how much work went into establishment of the website – I merely write an occasional knockabout piece – and to daily maintenance thereof I can only shake my head in bafflement at such carpet-chewing envy. Still, the site’s splendid spontaneous popularity speaks for itself. It goes from strength to strength and it deserves to. I hope the new venue does too. That will do more damage to the psyche of the envious loonies than even the website’s success. Probably leave them eating their own liver.

Blue Kipper.com has no secret of “success” or “market niche” (!) aspirations. If there are any rules at all (and you’ll have to ask Kipper if there are) they might be:

1. Keep laughing. It’s only a game.

2. If you have a bug up your arse, get it surgically removed.

3. If you know anybody with a bug up their arse, leave them alone. If they don’t have it removed it will eat them alive.

4. Be serious only when you need to. Then be DEADLY serious.

5. Stick with your own common sense, sense of humour, instincts and intelligence. Don’t listen to self-appointed gauleiters.

6. There are no “star fans”, not even among millionaire owners, only Evertonians all.

7. Footy is the greatest game in the world.

And that’s about it really. That’s probably why you keep coming back and why the site’s “unique hits” are so high – given it was set up by a bunch of enthusiastic fans with no experience of websites or the internet. “Success” is never sweeter or more deserved than when it is spontaneous and uncontrived. Whisper it to the Melledrew Tendency spivs though.

So the new venue was a success and a lively pre-match meet up with lots of familiar faces and a TV background of Burmingham giving Leeds a sound lunch time pasting. I even spoke to ex player flying winger Gary Jones and asked him if one of the urban legends was true, the one that he left because he didn’t get on with manager Billy Bingham and no sooner had he left than Billy got the welly. He said it was true, and, irony on irony, that the older pros had advised him to stay because Billy was definitely going to get the bullet and everything would be alright. So Billy went and Gordon Lee moved in while Gary tried to make a living at, er, Birmingham. There are lessons in life and football there.

Inside GP it definitely felt like Spring. For the first time in months you could actually smell the new mown pitch, always a brightener. On the pitch, Kevin Kilbane rightly replaced Jamie McFadden on the left and The Rad replaced Duncan Ferguson as Rooney’s upfront partner. For Boro, owner and fan Gibson’s dosh have provided Juninho, Zenden, Mendieta, Maccarone and Southgate, and the unspeakable Danny Mills at right back. More recently it has also brought the League Cup, their first ever trophy. Doesn’t seem to have done much for their fan base though since they brought only a tiny pocket of them to the lower Bullens stand. Can’t say I much like the personality of their manager McLaren either. He’s one of those people with a seemingly transfixed one-dimensional inane grin and just as trustworthy.

Unfortunately I have to report this was yet another pile of curdled turds of a match. The only consolation was that it wasn’t as bad as some of the others we’ve had this season. But it was marginal. Both sides were of course crap. Bored, I watched Mendieta for a short while to see if he was any better than my last viewing of him last year at the Nou Camp in the match against Celta Vigo. He wasn’t. Gibson ought to sue the arse off him under the Trades Description Act. So I switched my attention to Joey Yobo because he looked like the only one out there – Rooney and Radzinski apart – who wanted the ball and could actually do something with it. It saved me from dozing off. Joey had a stormer.

You would have thought Our Boys would have quickly twigged what every fan in the ground thought – The Duke and The Rad both the height of a toadstool and therefore largely incapable of winning any aerial battle. Er, no. At every opportunity the ball just got lamped up to them as though they had suddenly growed like Topsy. After fifteen minutes of this garbage we started taking the piss out of each other in the Lower Street End. Something had to be done to relieve the torpor.

Dicky Mint said, “I hope you write better shite this week than you did last week. Ozzie rang me after the last one and said Have You Seen What That Soft Twat’s Written THIS Time?” It all helped lighten the playing gloom. We groaned and talked about other things too, odd burst of good footy aside. A couple of chances came and went but nobody got really excited. What was the point?

One diversion was my inability to understand opposition fans’ cat-call at young Rooney, “You fat bastard!” He is of course anything BUT fat. In fact when he’s off on one of his dribbles he looks positively lissom. No, fat is untalented Woolyback oiks like sweaty Johnny Vegas or high octave Peter Kaye. Which means there’s more than a hint of desperation in opposition barracking of Wayne Rooney. Anything to put the lad off. Needless to say it fails anyway. Fortunately The Duke is gradually learning how to use it to motivate himself even more.

Just as this opinion got vented there came an interesting corner tactic. The Gravedigger came over to take a corner on our left in the Street End just below our seats. A couple of raised arms – wouldn’t you love to know the semaphore? – and he belted the ball in such a fashion you figured it was on its way to Huyton. Instead it dipped and died just right of the D at the precise moment The Duke arrived to drill it on the volley and it screamed a fraction wide of the ‘keeper’s right post. If that little tactical diversion ever works you’ll have to let the kids stay up late to watch it on TV. Later he ran at their defence, scared them shitless and battered one wide in more or less the same fashion. Since he was frequently starved of even reasonable service you can see why he might eventually decide he can only improve his game by moving on. At times like this you know he’s almost begging for a side kick like Scott Parker. Oh well.

No money, no choice. That’s the modern game. And with burgeoning guesstimates of a loss on our season of anything between two to five million English pounds you have to wonder what the long-term prospects are. No, I don’t mean the paper shuffling of a one club rights issue, which improperly considered is nothing more than a two years short term cushion with the opportunity for someone to ripoff the situation. Even if the rumours of a Grantchester return at board level (though welcome) are valid it still won’t be enough. Friends, it is surely the entire ownership and administration of the game which requires attention. It can’t go on as present. Think about it.

Back at the match, half time came and went and hardly anything changed. In recent games we’ve even abandoned any thoughts of a sudden second half resurgence. Sure enough the match ebbed and flowed with all the turgid spectacle of an oil spill on a beach.

Then we got one with ten minutes left through the splendid play of the best man on the park, Joey Yobo. He went into a tackle slightly right midway in our half, won the ball, neatly sidestepped their man and cracked an absolutely breathtaking pass all of forty metres wide left to Killa. He was equal to it and neatly one-touched it on its way to The Rad, left side of the box and with enough room to accelerate, which is always bad news for a defender. A slight dummy, switch of the ball from right to left foot and he smacked it home angled smartly inside the near left post. You see him do this and you think of all those one-on-ones he’s missed and you wonder how it could be the same man.

To a man the Street End was on its feet. “Right! Close up you thick bastards! Close up!” If only they’d listened to the crowd.

Two minutes later we let through an equaliser in yet more maddening circumstances, again from a corner on our left. I thought it went in off Joey but the announcer said it was a Job goal. It didn’t really matter, it was a bagatelle affair anyway. The air turned purple. Then it was full time. If you thought it would help, you would do to fate what The Big Yin tried to do so photogenically to Stefan Freund last week.

We need more of The Duke’s looming greatness. But he can’t do it alone much as he’d love to.

Off The Ball

*Alan 'Smudger' Smith, covering the game for Sky. Whenever he went live, a load of us in the Upper Bullens, started shouting 'Welease Bwian, Welease Wodewick', to remind him of his tewwible lisp.