Fans Comment
Peter Fearon

The damning indictment!
12 October 2005

Statistically, David Moyes deserves to be fired.

If you were an accountant and had never been to a match, didn't know anything else about him or about Everton; if you just looked at the figures, you'd have to say the bottom line is the bottom line.  You would get shut of him faster than you could say, Ibrahima Bakayoko.  Just look at the indictment:

1. He's in his fourth season and we are bottom of the league and still talking relegation, bleeding goals and can't get near one, starving for a win.  That alone would get most managers a short ride around Goodison Park.
    
2. He presided over one of the most tragic wasted opportunities of our history; the chance to progress in Europe and lift ourselves out of the financial basement and away from mediocrity.
    
3. In January he bought a striker overvalued by two or three hundred percent and his contribution to date has been negligible. Cost: £6.5M.
    
4. In the close-season, he bought a midfielder whose contribution to date has been in the general area of zero. Cost: £4.5M.
    
5. Move on to big buys from Europe: two players who immediately needed surgery on long-term career threatening injuries. Cost: £7M.
    
6. Total cost of failed signings, not including wasted wages to date: £18M, most of the money we received for Rooney.  Note: should we be relegated, those four players will be the first to ask for transfers to "more ambitious" clubs.
    
7. Unceremoniously showed Alan Stubbs, a talismanic player and dressing room leader, the door - arguably upsetting other players.
    
8. Persevered with tactics and a formation long after they were proved unsuccessful.

It's pretty convincing — but I still believe that to fire David Moyes at this stage would be to throw out the baby with the bathwater.  If we had the kind of board likely to attract someone markedly better — and yes, there are others much much better — then looking elsewhere might be an option.  But the fact is that the Board's recruitment techniques have been off-kilter in the past and hiring a new manager quickly and in the midst of a crisis is as likely to deepen it as it is to solve it.

David Moyes is still developing as a manager and part of the contract you make when you put your faith in a developing talent is the recognition that there will be setbacks, possibly serious setbacks.  This is a serious setback.

I think — I hope — he has the self-awareness to recognize that these last four buys have been disastrous and that he cannot make similar errors in the future; that he must somehow get something out of Beattie and Davies this season and he must blood some new talent from the reserves.

There is enough on the plus side of David Moyes's ledger that suggests this will all pass; Cahill has been a tremendous discovery and I doubt if there is a single Premiership club that wouldn't love to have him.  Arteta is an inspired signing and Neville is likely to prove as effective a general as Gravesen.  And he brought joy and effervescent energy back to the whole process of supporting Everton, something I have done for 40 years.

I'm long past the IMWT stage.  He is more than fallible.  But anyone who believes David Moyes should be fired should ask themselves these questions:

1. What will a new manager do differently to turn things around before the transfer window opens in January?. What new players will be at his disposal because Moyes has left?  Who will leave the treatment room faster because Moyes has been fired?
    
2. David Moyes is going to be someone's Alex Ferguson.  Do you really want him to end up managing another Premiership club to a success that could be ours?

This is the time to hang in there; to have faith, even if we don't have confidence; to have solidarity, even if we are racked with fear.  Nick Armitage asks when it would be time to say enough and take David Moyes for that fateful taxi ride.

My answer to Nick Armitage is that we may have to be prepared to go over the precipice with this man.  If we do, we will climb back and he won't.  He has at least shown us a taste of success and may again.  I fear another Walter Smith or another Mike Walker who will merely embed us further in mediocrity.

Peter Fearon

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