The Nick Armitage Column
Columnist: Nick Armitage

Perspective
28 March 2006

I really don’t know why we get all excited about the prospect of playing Liverpool.  I stupidly thought this may have the time that we did them, and my pants nearly exploded when Gerrard was finally sent off again in a derby.  But once again I spent the rest of the weekend thoroughly pissed off – it’s times like these that I really hate football, but we should be well used to this.

The games that mean something to us fans are the derbies and cup games.  Beating the shite pretty much beats anything else in a season and our slim chance of a bit of silverware is in a knockout competition.  Unfortunately the record of Moyes’s teams in both is simply abysmal but right now things need to be put into perspective; we have just lost to a team that moved into second place in the league, and at the moment they right at the top of their game.

Let’s face it, Everton Football Club has been in complete disarray for the best part of two decades, if you were a top class manager would you come and work at Goodison?  We simply cannot attract or afford a manager better than David Moyes so we have no choice other than accept his faults and support the man as best we can.  I don’t for one minute think Moyes is perfect and I don’t think he does either.  In fact there are times when he infuriates me with his dithering, negativity and indecision, but would you swap him for any other manager that we could realistically get?

Yes Moyes has faults, his tactics are inflexible, some of his signings are questionable, and he definitely has his favourites but calling for his head after the run we have just been on is a bit silly.

There are two ways to turn Everton around.  The first is the Chelsea approach, and that simply won’t happen to us; most people with money have a brain and people with a brain won’t put cash into an enterprise that the Everton board are part of – would you?  The only people who appear to be rich and stupid enough to invest in Everton are American, and unfortunately for us they don’t show any interest in British soccer (with one exception).

The second way is long hard shitty graft and it’s the way we are stuck with.  Rome wasn’t built in a day and the polarisation and the blatant protection of self-interests at the top of the game is making it harder and harder for clubs to play catch up.  The fact that we so often lose derbies is probably a symptom of the state the game rather than a reflection of the managerial capabilities of David Moyes.

Derby defeats hurt like hell but Moyes set the team up in the same way that the team has been set up since Christmas and since Christmas there hasn’t been a team that has amassed as many points as Everton.  All he could have done differently was drop Wright and Weir but even if he did, the shite still would have beaten us.

Next up are Sunderland at Goodison.  At this point in the season we go into a fair proportion of games anticipating three points and there haven’t been many times in the history of the Premiership that an Everton team is regularly expected to win.

Nick Armitage

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