Fans Comment
Seb Gordon

Something’s Gotta Give…
17 July 2004

Everton: developing a serious list?

This article isn’t going to be objective: it reflects how, given recent events, I feel right now about the football club I love and have supported all my life.  I don’t want an editor to pick holes in its sentiment, as was done in ‘No one else to blame.’  The chap makes some valid points.

What has really changed at Everton Football Club under the ‘leadership’ of True Blue Holdings?  We’ve got one of the best young managers in the game, I’ll give them that.  (They don’t have a clue what to do with him, except back him into a corner and make him fight with his hands tied behind his back...)  But at least they have done one thing right.  Woo hoo!

What else has changed?  We still don’t have any kind of profile or standing within the modern game.  We don’t know how to conduct business on or off the pitch and there is still no sign as to how in God’s name we plan to scrape ourselves from the depths back up to where we all feel we belong.  Neither are there any signs that the current controllers of the club are capable of that mammoth task.

This close season promised to be interesting with Moyes’s season-closing-statement; "Something will have to give here.  I'm not going to put the fans through another season like this."  But it has proved to be interesting for all the wrongs reasons.  And couldn’t you have guessed it?

We were all hoping for a radical overhaul of the clubs playing staff.  And that is what we have seen, if you consider culling to mean an overhaul.  If this season started tomorrow, we’d be staring relegation in the face.  But the season doesn’t start tomorrow.  It starts in just under a month — and that is the only glimmer of hope I have right now... that and the fact that the three promoted clubs might, just might, be worse than us.  When I look towards next season, I feel fear and I feel like crying.  I can see it now: every Saturday night feeling like crap, wondering when things will pick up, wondering where the next 3 points might come from.

Other close-season events lead me back to what I have known for a long time: something is so incredibly wrong deep within our football club.  For a man of Birch’s standing, with his reputation, to walk out of such a high-profile job within two months of starting, I’ve never heard anything like it before in my life!  It is another sign that the good ship Goodison is sinking.  The question is: how fast?  And is she revivable?

The Rooney saga is another example of the club’s ineptitude.  Moyes and the squad are in limbo at the moment; everyone needs to know if he’s staying or going.  The club has to encourage a decision (not that he’d have one to make if the club was being run properly) one way or the other as soon as possible.  (I realise this isn’t all the club’s fault, but surely they could hurry things along?)

I don’t have the foggiest as to what exactly is wrong with the running of our club.  What I feel I can say is that the boardroom is the place to look.  That is why I make the point that nothing has really changed under TBH.  This leads me, somewhat chaotically I admit, to my final, somehow optimistic, point.  Birch resigning and Gregg saying what he has said, and regardless of the outcome of the Rooney saga, makes me feel that something is starting to give... (if it hasn’t and it doesn’t, we’re screwed.)  Despite my earlier despair, I feel that things might just be about to change.  Whether it’s too late to save us from next season and all that it threatens, I don’t know, only time will tell.  Call me crazy, but I do still see the slightest glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel; you have to, don’t you?

One thing’s for sure, something that can throw us from despair to hope with such regularity must be worth fighting for.  We’ve shared the best of times, we’ve shared the worst of times (I hope); if things don’t change then, come early next season, we as fans must demand change at the highest level.  Everton Football Club, August 15th; let’s go to work……….

Seb Gordon

There's no need for editorial comment on this, Seb, because it is a well-written article; it makes no ridiculous claims or inconsistent statements; it does not appear to be factually incorrect, and it is very clear that you are stating things as your opinions, hopes, and desires — not as facts.  I'm sorely tempted to only publish articles that meet this standard in the future....  Ed.

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