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Forgive the Yak and He Will Score

The great essayist Lord Macauley once wrote ?We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality?. Had he but lived another 150 years, and read the recent threads about the ?Yak Crisis? he might have felt yet again vindicated in his observation. The response has at times bordered on the hysterical. Let us please try and put it into some perspective.

Yakubu broke club rules and no doubt the terms of his contract of employment. He has, if the reports are correct, been duly punished. I am yet to read, in any report, what, if any explanation has been offered by him for these failures. But one report had him ?full of remorse?. It is, perhaps, a reasonable assumption that his absence owed something to Nigeria?s defeat. Whatever it was, it was wrong.

Other managers have had to deal with much worse this season. Big Sam in his temporary occupation of the barcodes hot seat, woke up one morning to the news that one of his big signings was in jail. Even Wenger has had to cope with players having a public barney on the pitch. And these are the ones we hear about. Any professional will tell you that ?injury picked up in training? is often no more than a coded description of a discreet exercise of managerial discipline together with a fine which does not hit the back pages of the Daily Mail.

But from this infringement, speedily ,effectively and fairly dealt with by David Moyes, some have tried to make great capital, and others have stood on high to make sweeping moral judgments. Thus those who balked at his signing, perhaps those who also wrote in to compare him unfavourably with ?Back of the Echo? in his early days, have leapt up with finger ?wagging ?I told you so pronouncements? One thread was even entitled ?Is this the end of Yak? suggesting ,when the bare bones of the story were out, that the Yak was another Lineker who ? already has another club to go to.? It is even questioned whether we Evertonians will ever be able to get behind him again.

Well perhaps we ought to remember Neville Southall?s famous half time protest against Leeds all those years ago. Some fans, no doubt doing what they thought best for the club, produced a banner which read ( if memory serves) ?Judas Southall- once a binman always a binman)?. Well, whatever drove Neville to do as he did was sorted and he came back to us .

Now of course Yakubu?s brief spell so far does not really entitle him to find his name in the same article as the greatest goalkeeper this club has ever known, but the Southall incident affords a lesson from history against jumping to hasty conclusions. Yakubu responded perfectly to being dropped early into his Everton career and, in the view of most fair-minded neutrals, adopted a much more team- orientated focus to his game.

If nothing else, having received his punishment, he deserves to be given the fullest possible chance to make amends and not be subject to the hysterical and far-reaching judgments which have characterised some of the contributions on these pages over the last couple of days.

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