Fans Comment
Kevin Sparke

I want a divorce!
23/4/06

Dear Everton FC;

Over the last few weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that I have had enough of it all, all of the lies, all of your feeble excuses, all of your slovenly ways. This has gone on for far too long and I’m quite sure that now is the time to choose the path of action as I have contemplated upon our strained relationship and I’ve realised that I just can’t take anymore pain from you.

I want a divorce, my sweet, and no amount of reconciliation therapy is going to make a damn difference.

The problem is, as you know, I’m still in love you Everton FC; I’m still enraptured by the spectacle of some of the football you once beguiled me with. In your day you were the most beautiful of football teams and I can still remember how you captured my heart in them glorious days in the mid-1980’s. I said then that I’d stick with you through thick and thin, richer or poorer; but I’ve recently seen you for what you are — a money-grabbing tart who has used and abused me, treating me like a sugar daddy with a never-ending supply of cash from my threadbare pockets and I’m left wondering why I’ve been blind to your wastrel ways for so long.

For the last few years, you have promised me so much but delivered so little and I’m fed up defending your honour, madam, when you do precious little to defend it yourself.

All of my friends agree that you’ve been bad for me; some have even suggested that you’ve deliberately let yourself go since your Uncle Bill arrived upon the scene, depriving you of a steady supply of funds. I personally feel that your decline started long before Uncle Bill and it pains me to see that you need to sell your most precious of jewels in order to keep up appearances and compete with the other beautiful teams. However, I really feel that this selling of the family silver will prove to be a pointless quest as that most incorrigible of whores, Chelsea, will always be the Belle of the Ball — followed closely by those other painted strumpets: Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal.

You just can’t compete with these teams anymore as you are a battered old hag who has been around the track more times than a lurcher and long since lost any self-respect (I mean, look at the slum where you live for goodness sake).

I know that the reason for much of your sad decline is not entirely yours as we live in corrupt and evil times where football has polarised into the elite G14 and the rest, but I can’t help feeling that you could try to help yourself now and again by at least trying to battle to defend your virtue and not disgrace yourself by giving in too easily, to sometimes the most feeble of advances. Other hard-up Girls can manage this (Spurs, Blackburn, Bolton) why cant you?

Don’t get me wrong, Everton; I could never look at another woman in the way I once looked at you and I’d never be unfaithful to your memory by having a dalliance with any other football team — you are far too precious to me for that.

I will come and visit you now and again just to see how you are getting on without me, but I’m afraid to say that the blind romance we’ve have enjoyed for the last 30 years or more is now officially dead as I no longer feel that I am at your beck and call.

I wish you all the best and feel sorry for your other 40,000 lovers, especially the Rob Foxes and Dutch Schaeffers of the world who really deserve so much better from you. (The Tony Marsh's, Luq Yus’s and other pack of assorted whiners... well, you were made for each other).

You have changed, my love, and I never thought you would; football has changed and I never though it would... I’m not sure I want to change with it.

(If there is one fact to condemn the way that football is run today it is that the best English wide player I have seen for over 20 years — Shaun Wright-Phillips — is currently a bench-warmer for Chelsea and we, the football fans, are deprived of his silky skills week-in, week-out, just because a rich man wants another bauble to add to his collection).

I’ll drop by in August to pay my respects.

Love always, your once avid fan

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