Half-time whistle 2004-2005:
The stuff dreams are made of
By
Mickey Blue Eyes

                   “Lookin’ back at it now, what can you say?

                   It feels like it was a dream…………..Yeah, that’s it, a dream.

                   Maybe, none of it never happened.

                   Because when I look back at it today, this is the best sense I can make of it.”

                   “Jack Ruby” (Danny Aiello) in “Ruby,” directed by John MacKenzie (1992).

As I write, this is our league record this season:

Position 4th.
Played 20.
Won 12.
Drawn 4.
Lost 4.
Goals for 23.
Goals against 17.
Goal difference +6.
Points 40.

Now pause and read it again. Rub your eyes and read it once more.

Yes, it’s STILL true.

And all this after virtually everybody (me included) said we were in for a torrid time this season and might even get relegated if events went against us. Given events of the previous season plus the Rooney outgoing plus Paul Gregg’s unwanted barrow boy antics, who could blame anybody for reaching the same conclusion? You certainly couldn’t blame those fans who didn’t renew their season tickets. Finishing 2003-2004 seventeenth with some truly appalling displays was disappointment enough but the Gregg press release-provoked boardroom shenanigans were the final straw. Sports-wise it was all very glum even by the standards of recent years.

So, first things first, congratulations to everybody at the club – minus Gregg and his telephone marionettes – for achieving what is by any standard an amazing turnaround. First in line, the players, then David Moyes, then everybody else. It would take an equally astonishing collapse for even the most jaundiced fan to fail to recognise the playing gains of the first half of the season. You could easily understand why all Evertonians were first amazed, then relieved at forty points by the turn of the year, then astonishingly Europe-optimistic. If we DO manage to qualify for Europe it will be the icing on the revival cake. You can bet your bottom Euro the club’s enemies and other resentful loons will be praying we fall at the last hurdle as we did two seasons ago. It remains to be seen if everyone has learned the lesson of that painful experience.

I am not so much interested in statistics as motivation. After all, the figures tot up almost automatically if you get the playing side right. So I’ll leave the percentages and all the rest of the arithmetic to someone else. Instead, it’s worth trying to guess how the players and David Moyes turned it around and what caused them to do it. We will never know the reality unless someone breaks the omerta that properly governs every dressing room. But there are some things we DO know and they might just be the key to it all.

Firstly, it’s worth remembering that we signed only two players to add to last season’s squad, Marcus Bent and Tim Cahill. Everyone else was a survivor from the previous season’s wreckage. There was also a clear out of some players who plainly weren’t going to make it except as a weight on our wages bill. Which did not of course include irreplaceable Wayne Rooney, certainly the best young player this fan has ever seen in a Royal Blue shirt and plainly destined for greatness if he manages his affairs well. Sadly for us Rooney simply didn’t hit it off with Moyesy. The chemistry wasn’t there. And when the disgusting Stretford and his disgusting agency became Rooney’s disgusting manipulators the final result was scarcely in doubt. With Stretford in court and in crocodile tears (with a million and a half trousered notes to mop up the pool) Rooney was at Manchester United, which is where he said he wanted to be – “once a blue” or no “once a blue” – and, bafflingly, hasn’t stopped saying so since. Meantime we had to get on with what we had and forget him.

Reasonably reliable accounts tell us that pre-season Moyesy had an unexpected confrontation with an executive – not a director, as it should have been – in which he was told some home truths about his management approach. It was a seminal moment, just as the previous pre-season a group of players faced him off and told him they wouldn’t give him the efforts he had when we finished seventh, that they didn’t appreciate his (to them) outdated overbearing attitude to man-management. Apparently this time he listened, met the players and they wiped the slate clean, doubtless aided too by looming expiry of contract for no less than eleven players. Nor should we underestimate the affect of a stinging article in the local press by journo David Prentice, who implied some of the players were “taking the piss” the previous season. For once I haven’t met a single fan who disagreed with a journalist’s opinion. If accounts are true, Stubbsy gave a copy to every player and pinned it up in the dressing room. For professional athletes sometimes a good kick in the arse from outside is more effective than all the thoughtful words in the lexicon. Whatever the truth of any of this précis, the affect was little short of miraculous, and it is to everybody’s credit.

Not that that is how it looked in the first game at home to Arsenal. We expected to lose heavily and we did. If Arsenal hadn’t taken their foot off the gas it could have been even worse than 1-4. By then I had already decided that if we were going to be relegated then I wanted to be there as much as I could and I planned accordingly, fully expecting the worst. Instead, we went on an unbeaten run of six matches and only lost the seventh in a fractious match at home to Tottenham on October 2nd. Maybe we should have taken note of the display in the second match when we won at Crystal Palace. I wonder how things would have gone subsequently had not Stubbsy made a vital goal line clearance and their man hadn’t missed a sitter while we were losing. We lost only at Chelsea between the Tottenham game and our defeat at Charlton in the final game of 2004. Astonishingly, we were flying instead of belly flopping.

But the manner of playing was just as pleasing as the results. An obvious 4-5-1 formation was not only effective it had us playing some really good, tight-passing football. Everyone played their part, nobody let us down. Everyone gave a hundred percent even when they were having a bad time of it. And Moyesy’s substitutions tactics could scarcely be faulted. These involved taking off either Leon Osman or Marcus Bent after they had run themselves into the ground and replacing them with Duncan Ferguson and A. N. Other. By the time of his deserved suspension The Big Yin had scored some valuable winners or had a hand in some decisive moments.

You would have to be the world’s worst curmudgeon – sadly, like every other club we have a few of those unwanted misery arses – to have a go at any member of the squad. They have all done really well within their own limitations, and no sensible fan could ask more than that. If we were properly ready to criticise them for a lack of professionalism last season then it is only right we give credit where it is fully due this time around. Obviously, it isn’t all down to David Moyes, much as our romanticism would like it to be. He can set the playing and fitness standards but once the players get on the pitch it is up to them, subs tactics notwithstanding. They have been exemplary.

Nigel Martyn continues to give us cause to rue the day unlamented Peter Johnson made a hash of signing him first time around. It gets more and more difficult to imagine the team without him and his Indian Summer approach to the game. Tony Hibbert is finally fulfilling his potential and has been nothing less than magnificent, while Sandro Pistone’s classy confidence and play has thrived on the backs of improved team performance. Davey Weir and Alan Stubbs have been so solid, so good in unison, you cannot see superb Joey Yobo replacing either of them without the intervention of injury. Leon Osman’s ball control and short distribution has made rightside mid his own in spite of a lack of physical strength, while Tim Cahill appears to be exactly the type of young player Moyesy always said he has in mind. Tim still suffers from naivete at times but his determination to learn quickly seems to match his playing hunger. Centre mid owes its effectiveness to a combination of Lee Carsley’s tackling and Tommy Gravesen’s ball control and passing. The Gravedigger continues to baffle us, though, with his in-and-out approach to the game, and the ineffectiveness of some of his tackling despite the great body strength he shows while shielding or turning with the ball. Paradoxically, if Gravesen’s midfield game wilts it has a near direct affect on our whole performance, which also explains why some of the fans get infuriated with him. Wide left, Kevin Kilbane has obviously been asked to play a little deeper this season to make sure the centre five hold a disciplined line, which in turn means he isn’t as much of a direct forward threat as he was last season, but it also ensures we have strength in numbers during the kind of attacking phase we have come to expect at some time in the game, usually in the second half.

Up front, Marcus Bent has been nothing less than remarkable in his approach to his allocated solo role. In my opinion he has been our player of the season. It in no way diminishes his contribution to say he makes the absolute best of his limited natural abilities by total commitment to every single ball he goes after, sometimes a good deal less than fity-fifty. That said, some of his first touches in tight situations are first class by any standard. Moreover he takes some fearsome stick from defenders without a sign of complaint or weakness. Small wonder he is greeted with a storm of applause whenever he comes off exhausted, sometimes limping after a kick on the ankle.

The substitutes bench has served to emphasise the squad difficulties faced by David Moyes when he deals with contract extensions and team changes for next season. It has usually been occupied by any combination of veterans Duncan Ferguson, Kevin Campbell and Steve Watson and younger players such as Richard Wright and Gary Naysmith, none of whom have let us down. None of the younger players have yet been able to make a breakthrough, though force majeur might change that. Stranger things have happened in football. With eleven players out of contract by season end there are some hard negotiations and choices ahead of David Moyes and the players.

It goes without saying we have missed Wayne Rooney badly. Conceivably we could have been top if he had stayed and events had worked out better. I only hope our supporters don’t make the mistake of giving the media one of its phoney “controversies” if the young man plays at Goodison in the league fixture. He chose to make his career elsewhere and there’s nothing wrong with that even allowing for tribalism. He did nothing more than the rest of us would do in our jobs. Alas, that is the way of football life. It isn’t like industrial manufacturing or straightforward commercial production. Sports simply don’t work that way and anyone who thinks they do is living in cloud cuckoo land.

Which brings me to events off the field. In my opinion the pre-season antics of Paul Gregg were a farcical tactic that failed and caused us nothing but useless public discord. The sooner he and his few supporters in the Sharesellers Association are gone the better so we can get on with restoring our playing fortunes in tandem with better administration of the club’s affairs by new CEO Keith Wyness. One can understand it if Gregg wishes to recover his original investment. What most of us will not accept is his manner of going about it and the comical absurdity of his PR company’s ludicrous press releases. They have fooled nobody. The sooner he realises that, backs off, strikes a sensible deal, and does one with the marionettes in the Sharesellers Association, the better for our club and our fans. Once he has gone that will leave the SA deservedly high and dry. Of course the main problem appears to lie in the terms of his original agreement to buy in via True Blue Holdings and how these are mitigated when he eventually goes on his way. Like everybody else in football it is time he came to terms with the facts of football life described in the previous paragraph, and that the financial cow has been milked so dry he might well have to accept some powder substitute. The rest of us are Evertonians in this for life. We don’t need or want the kind of behaviour exhibited by Paul Gregg in his press releases. One hopes too the remainder of the board can help build on Keith Wyness’s good start and provide the sort of rational support he desperately needs if he is to succeed, Fortress money or no Fortress money, yet another EGM or no EGM.

So playing matters have not looked brighter, and club administration matters look like they will finally break out of the torpor that has enveloped the club for far too long. But it is all still tenuous. Playing fortunes might well turn on the injury to Nigel Martyn’s calf, or Duncan Ferguson’s sending-off, or whether a player decides to join us or not this month. Who can tell?

Meanwhile, playing achievements thus far have been astonishing given last season’s horrors. So a big thank you to David Moyes and the players for dealing with the situation like sterling professionals. They have been a credit to themselves and to us.

Let’s hope we get more of the same in 2005.