THE METEORIC BRILLIANCE OF DAVID MOYES
By
Mickey Blue Eyes.

“Renew your brilliance. It is the privilege of the Phoenix. Excellence grows old and so does fame. Custom wears down our admiration, and a mediocre novelty can conquer the greatest eminence in its old age. So be reborn in courage, in intellect, in happiness, and in all else. Dare to renew your brilliance, dawning many times, like the sun, only changing your surroundings. Withold it and make people miss it; renew it and make them applaud.”
BALTASAR GRACIÁN (translated by Christopher Maurer 1994) 1601-1658.

“meteoric adj. 1 a of or relating to the atmosphere b dependent on atmospheric conditions. 2 of meteors. 3 rapid like a meteor; dazzling, transient (meteoric rise to fame).”
THE CONCISE OXFORD DICTIONARY (eighth edition, 1990), page 746.

David Moyes is not the perfect football manager. Nor is any other manager in game. There is not, never has been and never will be such a man. All of them are nothing more than members of the human race. In other words, he has strengths and weaknesses like everybody else. Sorry to state the obvious, but sometimes this simple fact gets lost in the all the manufactured nonsense, phoney hype and chauvinist fatuity that bedevils the game.

On the basis of playing fortunes so far this season it would be easy to claim David Moyes has “failed.” After all, here we are stuck in the bottom three, playing wretchedly, out of three – four, if you count the Premiership – competitions already and staring at the football abyss of relegation. Apparently, matters could hardly be worse in his fourth full season in charge. Since it follows an amazing achievment in finishing fourth last season there is a sense of utter frustration. Intelligent fans stare at each other at a loss to explain it, though there’s no shortage of vapid imbeciles queuing up to prate from their own neurotic soapbox about the easy formula for playing success, that all you need is this player or that player, or to adopt this or that formation, or – gawd preserve us from hearing this convenient tripe again – that he has “lost the dressing room.” Once you’ve heard one of those nutters you’ve heard them all.

But David Moyes has not failed, far from it. He still has great possibilities before him. He can still become a great manager. In my view his greatest obstacle lies in his own mind. Everybody of ambition and talent has such a moment and how they deal with it is the greatest single challenge of their lives. It can go either way. Even that most absurd of human superstitions, organised religion, recognises this with the term “crisis of faith.” So it is scarcely unusual. Once again it goes with the species.

Though I have my own opinions on the subjects of individual players and formations I haven’t the slightest intention of airing them in this essay. There’s no point. Furthermore, unless you are consistently present at training sessions and in the dressing room your opinions really aren’t worth a carrot, practically speaking, and they’re probably wrong anyway. Paying at the gate earns you the right to say what you want about the spectacle and the club you support but it is no substitute for common sense. If you are amongst sensible and intelligent friends it makes for lively footy chat in the pub for an hour or two and not much else. The only thing I will say on the matter is the rather obvious observation I made after the Wigan home match. Which is, relegation is on the cards if we don’t pull up our playing socks. I said the same after a few games into the season we finished seventeenth. I dare say you said much the same thing yourself. It still applies in spades.

Frankly, at our worst this season we have looked easily the worst and most spineless Everton team I have ever seen in the Royal Blue shirt. That is quite something after ten seasons of mostly difficult times. Our best relief during that time was finishing seventh in David Moyes’ first full season and then fourth last season, both of which were heroic performances in the circumstances. Because he managed it twice over the course of a full season there is no question of it being lucky. No, it was through hard, often brilliant work. Both seasons inevitably led the fans to believe the foundations were laid for a long-awaited and yearned-for revival. Though few things in life go in straight lines you couldn’t blame them. It wasn’t a question of “over-expectation” (the worst case of blaming the victim you will ever hear) because that was never there, at least not among my friends and the fans in our area of the ground. Everybody was and is ready to settle for steady improvement. For example before this season started I often heard long-term fans say they would settle for a top ten place if they had to. For them last season was a miraculous quantum leap and not a constant. This is my view too.

But my subject is how David Moyes deals with the situation and its origins. I believe both are inside his own personality and character. Based on nothing more than my own instincts and anecdotal evidence I suspect he’s undergoing a natural stage of personal development, exampled by his astonishingly honest quotes after the Bucharest and West Brom away games, “I don’t know what went on out there.” If accurately quoted this is dangerously close to simply throwing your hands in the air at the precise moment when you need to be rolling up your sleeves. It may be completely honest but one hopes he has not repeated the pre-season mistake he made before we finished seventeenth in 2003-2004, that of naivete. At the time he told some senior players they wouldn’t be around after season’s end. It was a disastrous error and it showed in the way the team played subsequently. A good military officer will never admit fear or casualty rate to his men on the eve of battle any more than a good manager of anything will concede he doesn’t have some responses available. Disappearing is not possible. You plan to take it on head-on with all the determination, talents and assets at your disposal. After that you fight to reduce the element of chance. Natural abilities aside, these are the main precepts of leadership give or take a sophistry or two. You get up front and take the consequences. You keep everything else to yourself. And you never stop because you can’t afford to if you want to be a leader. It isn’t a question of “nice guys always finish last,” more a case of “naïve indecisive guys always get walked on.” It is, of course, the loneliest place in the world. This is a necessity, not an option. A great leader understands humanity and uses it to achieve great things.

And professional football is particularly unforgiving. It always was, even during its more leisurely days. It is now the case that results are the only things that matter. If you manage to play good football along the way then that’s all very nice and welcome but hardly anybody cares very much about quality, be it hypocritical media or fickle fans. Oh sure the occasional platitude is trotted out, soon to be forgotten when playing fortunes get tricky. But who now remembers the silky football Ipswich tried to play under George Burley even as they slithered helplessly toward relegation? And the moment the great unbeaten Arsenal team (I would argue the greatest club side I have ever seen) of a few seasons ago so much as skipped a beat they were immediately besieged with the artificial hysteria of “crisis” as they introduced new, younger players and attempted to transit from one team to the next. There are plenty of other examples. It has all gone way beyond the old dictum that it is a game of opinions. It is possible now to argue that it is a game of mass mutual cynicism, reported by a useless two-faced lying media and supported increasingly by a collection of masochistic jeering harpies waving a set of accounts or the latest playing statistics.

All of which makes Moyes’ obvious honesty almost suicidal. It’s a bit like shaking your fist at a low flying enemy fighter bomber after it has just wiped out the rest of your foxhole. The best revenge is to shoot down the bastard and nail up one of his flaps in the mess. All the rest is wishful thinking or posthumous sentiment at a graveside. The paradox for everybody is that it is Moyes’ apparent honesty which has been one of his main attractions. Which prompts the hope he hasn’t mistaken mere self-righteousness for honesty. Such one dimensional self-deception only succeeds in convincing you all your decisions are right; and nothing could be more fundamentally flawed. A good and beneficial dose of worldly wisdom is in order.

The thing is, this is David Moyes’ team. He has said so himself. He was given the money. He bought them. They are not bad players. Maybe not true greats – though one or two certainly have that possibility in them – but definitely much above average. Mikky Arteta even reminds me of Colin Harvey at his best. They have not performed as a team. This cannot be due to the two remaining players from the players’ revolt of a couple of seasons ago. Something else is in play because Moyesy has already proved he can get performances out of unlikely situations. Perhaps the near misses against Villarreal deflated them and then the horror show in Bucharest completely knocked the stuffing out of them and set him off on a period of self-doubt. If so, maybe he has been unable to conceal it from the players and they have sensed his uncertainty. Young athletes can be animalian in their instincts. Young men suffused with determinist hormones often confuse uncertainty with weakness. Anybody who has managed a group will tell you that can trigger a mutual mood. Before you know where you are the situation can get out of control. At such a time it is the manager’s job to attack the problems as a challenge to his own abilities. There is no time for self-pity or surrender to chance. I repeat, disappearing is not an option, nor is the I’ve-done-what-I-can-and-it’s-their-fault-attitude.

Another thing David Moyes might consider is whether he has been over dogmatic in his man-management methods. If so, he will find it much harder to soften his approach if he has presented an inflexible front for too long. Players no more forget a sleight, real or imagined, than does a manager faced with intransigence. Maybe he should learn better the art of “an arm around the shoulder.” There is a time for discipline, a time for friendly persuasion. All good managers know how to apply this with an even hand. It isn’t something you will find in any coaching manual or engraved on an FA badge. Wisdom never is. Sports performance motivation is not, never has been, and never will be a mere matter of cold objectivity or the counterfeit humanity of qualifications. Human beings simply aren’t built that way. I hope they never are.

Then again, there are some elements of his buying policy maybe he ought to reconsider. For example, if my information is correct – and the source hasn’t let me down yet – he was provided with a list of four left backs whose contracts were on offer. He signed Nuno Valente without even seeing him, or so the story goes. With so much at stake such an approach is little short of irresponsible. If the story is true it almost negates Moyesy’s image of a thorough manager who lets little escape his attention. There are other accounts of losing the initiative at vital moments in potential transfer deals. All it does is reinforce the impression that when it comes to the crunch he hesitates too long or changes his mind and then pays the price for unnecessary delay. As the great Nye Bevan – himself an outstanding leader – once said, not entirely tongue in cheek, “If you stand in the middle of the road all you get is run over.” There is no reason why professional sportsmen should be exempt from such a straightforward philosophy.

On the other hand he proved in two excellent seasons how good he can be even with our limited resources. When we finished seventh it could so easily have been in the top four. Only a late run of poor results prevented it. When we finished fourth we stumbled again but just fell through the finishing tape. In both cases the final position was well earned and the football wasn’t at all bad, sometimes better than good. There is no such thing in professional football as two season-long flashes-in-the-pan. The main query now is whether that is the best he is capable of. Up to now David Moyes has proved beyond question he can organise a Premiership club, plan its campaign, motivate his players, regenerate its fans’ enthusiasm, map out successful formations and tactics and even tentatively promise restored fortunes. Against all the odds he even managed us into Europe. For such a young, untested man in such a mercilessly competitive environment it was a truly amazing achievment. It isn’t too much to describe it as brilliant and meteoric.

Then, apparently, unexpectedly, he ran out of ideas. It was like stepping off a cliff in the dark. When we lost at Arsenal this season I still have this image of him at the dotted line, hand to his forehead, plainly and honestly baffled. I found it a disconcerting moment. He really did look totally out of his depth. Also, usually you can tell when things aren’t going well for him because he suddenly vanishes altogether from the dotted line, though this might have more to do with an burgeoning attempt at a more mature general approach. In the meantime it is as though his lightning has been conducted to earth. I haven’t the slightest idea why this part of his professional approach appears so publicly. Only he can have some notion of the cause. Which is why he now faces his greatest personal challenge. That is, to conquer his own apparent professional defaults. Not only must he reorganise and remotivate the players, he must remotivate himself and the coaching staff. He has to save the situation once again. Is this the apex of his managerial career or just another puzzle for him to solve as ambition pushes him onwards? Or, to use another lurid metaphor, is the meteor to fall to earth and bury itself?

The vast majority of our fans were won over long ago as his fresh faced enthusiasm and intensity replaced Walter Smith’s obvious exhaustion and lack of promise. Even in this cynical football era they trusted him almost without qualification. David Moyes was and is badly needed at our club. A very small part of this has to do with the catalytic, morale-boosting “People’s Club” comment but mostly it had to do originally with the fact that the same collection of players immediately responded to him and his methods, though his second full season sent up a huge warning flare. From which he and they seemingly learned mutual lessons and then gave us our best Premiership season ever. At present the fans still have formidable faith in him even in our current predicament. Sadly, though, this is beginning to wilt with each bad result. Another long run of defeats will probably see it finally breached, perhaps beyond repair. Sadly, the days of trust would be over for everybody, Moyesy included. That is the way of professional sport. Meanwhile, the eternal jeremiahs yowl at the moon, some of them yapping away for his resignation or sacking, others beating their puny chests with the tiresome I-told-you-so mantra of the ale house inadequate. They will always be there, as they are at every other club in the country. But you don’t need to be one of their rabid, tiny pack. All you need to do is look at the man with your own common sense.

Only time will tell if he is to be just a Stendahl “brilliant maybe.” Few doubt it is within his grasp to become a great manager. He is still young enough to achieve it. The big question is how he adjusts his reach to finally gather the game’s prizes. I suspect the answer is inside himself, nowhere else. It is up to him to find it. And if and when he finds it, it will be entirely without the aid of the imbeciles who can’t wait to satisfy their own need for a scapegoat. After David Moyes it will be someone else. Then again, whatever his strengths or weaknesses I am willing to bet he is a better member of the human race than they are.

And that is why I fervently hope he succeeds even more than hitherto. (28/11/05)

Mickey Blue Eyes - All His Stuff

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