After Palace, the closing door
By
Mickey Blue Eyes

All sensible fans know it is next to useless trying to forecast a match result. Fate has a way of making asses out of those who do, self-styled pundits included. It is worth bearing this in mind as we enter the home straight of six league fixtures, three home, three away. It is also worth bearing in mind that maintaining or “losing” fourth place will bring out the sheer looniness and obsessive mindsets of some fans. In their case, if we hold on to it euphoria will overtake common sense just as disappointment and hate-filled opportunism will if we end up fifth or sixth. In the latter case it will be necessary for some inadequate birdbrains to blame someone or some thing or event. But whatever happens, the table never lies, not ever. Having come this far I will be happy as long as the players continue to give it their best shot. We can ask for nothing more. Mere fans’ chauvinism will play no part though the level of vocal support might make a marginal difference at crucial moments.

Of course it isn’t easy keeping a sense of balance in current circumstances. None of us expected to be in this position with so few games left. Yet here we are, and had we kept our form from the first half of the season we would have been uncatchable now. Three times during the season we had an opportunity to stretch the gap between fourth and fifth to ten or eleven points. We missed the chance each time. So who was to “blame”? Answer: Nobody. That’s the way of professional sport. You can guarantee nothing in an honestly played game. There are too many variables.

The best illustration is Chelsea. Now champions-elect, last season they were close but not close enough. All the money they spent then got them “only” to a Champions League place. The difference this time around is Mourinho and a couple of new players. But the human chemistry could just as easily have failed to catalyse. Who would be to “blame” then? Answer: Nobody. The margin between success and failure in professional football has always been paper-thin. There’s nothing new about it. When Bill Dean got his sixty goals and then we won the championship in 1928 we ended up in the second division a couple of years later, Dean or no Dean. Blackburn did the same thing in the nineties. The game is littered with examples for those who care to use the given tool of their natural intelligence.

The enemy, then, is an air of unreality and sometimes deluded expectation induced by chauvinism and financial spivs. Self-delusion has been a central component of human culture for all recorded history and there’s no sign it will vanish any time soon. And in the last quarter of the last century we reaped the whirlwind of the logical conclusion of fans’ chauvinism. When results don’t go the way hoped for, for some people it leads to the kind of reaction you get from disappointed children – tantrums, tears and lashing out at the nearest convenient target. It could be a player, a manager, or a director, even other fans. Human behaviour has made some tiny advances since Salem but we are still the same emotional mammals and just as subject to irrationality. Otherwise, why are we so attached to watching twenty-two men kick a ball around a football field? The main difference now is the way in which money is infused and taken from the game. This has merely succeeded in INCREASING chauvinism and wilful self-delusion. Too often common sense has flown the coop as the grubby fox got in and barrow-boy opportunists started selling shares in chicken feed. The game has yet to reap the full whirlwind of financial thuggery but it is well on its way.

At the time of writing we are due home matches versus Manchester United, Birmingham and Newcastle, and away matches versus Arsenal, Fulham and Bolton. Each of them looks difficult for different reasons. I haven’t a clue how they will end or whether we will hold on to fourth position. Nobody has. Just as it was crazy to talk up the away result at Aston Villa, so it was absurd to make more that it was worth of the home result to Crystal Palace. In both cases the team played really well when on top and were worthy and easy winners. Still, there was no need to go overboard about it anymore than there was when results went against us. Against Palace we were as bad in the first half as they were. So what? Like you, I want us to win every game 5-0 playing superlative footy. But with our present circumstances it just isn’t going to happen. Actually, it won’t happen whatever our circumstances. Look at Arsenal and Manchester United this season, then look at maybe three or four other teams who have spent a lot of money and still trail us despite our run of bad results since the New Year dawned and Tommy Gravesen left and James Beattie came in.

The fact is, whatever happens, the squad, the management team and the directors have performed wonders to even get us to our present position, never mind hold on to it. If we DO hold on to it I reckon it will be a modern footy miracle concoction and David Moyes and Alan Irvine will be the chief alchemists of it. And for all their squabbling, so will the board of directors after they did their bit by keeping Moyesy on when there were some raised voices demanding he go after last season’s disasters, and giving him a bit of money to spend too. It would be entirely right for Moyesy to win Manager of the Year. Nobody will have done more to deserve it. Where the directors are concerned you can’t have it two ways – though some will doubtless try – by blaming them when things aren’t going right on the field of play, then when matters turn around say it had nothing to do with them. This smacks more than a little of rampant hypocrisy and counterfeit self-righteousness, let alone a palpable ignorance of how groups of imperfect human beings try to work together. If you want yet another example of the difficulties of this you need look no further than Newcastle, Aston Villa and the Scottish club Rangers – and many others here and in Europe.

And then you might consider that David Moyes and Alan Irvine will likely have to do it all over again next pre-season as they rebuild the squad once again. That’s the reality and no amount of wishful thinking or hysterical foot stamping is going to change it.

So, as this season draws to its close by all means keep hoping and cheering. Just keep a sense of proportion. Gawd knows we need it after the experience of recent years and the ludicrous continuing spectacle of self-interested Paul Gregg attacking the club at every opportune moment through a PR firm located appropriately in Mathew Street – and then saying in the next PR breath, “Let’s all pull together for now”! This from the man who didn’t even attend a match for over a year. A pity too he didn’t behave thusly back in August 2004 on the eve of the season. Why, therefore, should he be surprised when the only answer he and his soon-to-be-abandoned squiffy marionettes gets is the sound of distant, derisive laughter?

If we get into Europe there is no group of loyal fans who will have earned it more than those sensible Evertonians who know the game and love it. Fortunately they are the vast majority. The rest don’t matter much except maybe to them, though you can be sure they will make as much noise as a junior school playground if we don’t make it. School, of course, closes early in the day.

Meanwhile, we have a season to complete and a sense of reality to conduct. And maybe, just maybe, the notion that next season will see us back in Europe. Anything can happen and, given this season’s events, probably will.

I suspect there are a few twists in the tale yet. Bring ‘em on, bring ‘em on. (18/04/05)

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