I was never really a huge fan of David Moyes, apart from the young fiery version who first walked into a comatose Everton and looked ready to kick everybody up the arse.
The club didn’t have a pot to piss in, were struggling to score goals and sat 15th in the table, having won 1 Premier League game out of the previous 13 when he took over from Walter Smith, all red hair, rage-filled face and Ren & Stimpy stare. So, there are certainly parallels to the current situation there, but the hunger that made the bloke a rather intense figure back then has (understandably) well and truly faded away thanks to the mileage, failures and many frustrations.
It wasn’t that I ever considered Moyes a poor manager throughout his first spell – far from it – but rather that I could never buy into the perpetual media myth that he was performing ‘miracles’ season after season and we should simply count our blessings, curtail any fanciful ambitions, and come to consider finishing ‘best of the rest’ on a few occasions as the sole crowning point now possible for a football club where a large number of fans still remembered what it was like to actually reach the fucking peak.
I thought he had run his race long before he got his ultimate wish of welding his lips to Fergie’s ring, shook my head through his ‘emotional’ send-off, laughed as he appeared to get delusions of grandeur and dug his own grave in Manchester, and then put him from my mind completely (other than as a figure of mirth to be mocked now and again for any mishaps, of course) as he moved on to live out the rest of his career as a footballing nomad… or so I thought.
Moyes rather redeemed his reputation quite a bit with West Ham, despite the familiar claims from supporters of dithering and defensive football, and I found that I was actually mildly pleased to see him pick up a European trophy, minor pot or not.
At one point in time, I would probably have fumed at his return, but the possibility has been mooted often enough over the years to allow me to definitively get any and all such antediluvian gripes off my chest. After all, according to his mates in the media, he’s been ‘set to be appointed’ ever since Sam Allardyce was sent packing to sniff his own pants and pontificate about how he would shit all over Pep if the press would just let people forget he absolutely loves a Wall’s sausage roll.
Every single time the Everton job came up in the last 8 years, Moyes was instantly chucked in alongside the favourite contenders, with ‘insiders’ supposedly claiming he was deep in talks, being considered, about to be confirmed, already holed up in the building like Hans Gruber and stalking the halls with a sharpened spork… on the verge of blowing a blood vessel after some “silly wee bastard” from one of the ‘big clubs’ sent the lift down with a dead body inside and a note velcroed to its chest saying ‘Now we have a machine gun. Ho Ho Ho’.
It’s like mere length of tenure meant the lazy twats would never let it lie. While Bill Kenwright was still around, it was kind of understandable. It was an obvious shout that provided them with an easy headline which, regardless of proof, always carried with it the possibility of perhaps coming true, due to the sentimental way the old tit prattled on about their long-term partnership and the fact he was loathe to end it in the first place.
Now it’s actually materialised, these many years later, I’m mostly apathetic to it all.
It’s happened. He’s here. We’re in the shit and there’s hard work for him ahead. Let’s just get on with it.
There are seemingly many others out there though who are far from apathetic and whose strength of feeling hasn’t diminished one iota in the decade-plus change since the man who made ‘the People’s Club’ declaration departed Goodison with a misjudged guard of honour and a post-it note marked ‘must pop back for Marouane’.
The past 6 days have seen people online calling him a ‘shithouse’ and a ‘snake’, stating that they can’t stand the man, that they ‘genuinely hate him’, that seeing him as Everton manager again made them ‘physically sick’, and some even swearing not to set foot in the ground until he’s gone forever… preferably after being stripped naked and dragged through the streets in chains while a squad of heckling old crones pelt scalding hot gravel off his horribly pallid Scottish skin.
A mate of mine sent me a text last Saturday saying simply “lowest point as an Evertonian” and I’m still struggling to get my head around how that could possibly be so… Seriously? With the shite we’ve had to bear witness to?
Where the hell have you been for the last 7 years? Rutger Hauer is going fucking radge right now wanting a refund on your eyes. (“Bladerunner!! That’s what they used to call Moyes when he turned up to one of the ‘big clubs’ grounds with his butter knife and shield made of toast, before turning tail and somehow managing to get out of there alive.”)
We’ve suffered through some of the worst managerial hires possible – where it seemed almost as if the club were actively attempting to antagonise and rile the fans into a rabid frenzy – in Allardyce and Benitez.
The appointment of Moyes may be viewed as uninspired, risibly retrograde, chastening even… but it’s by no means the unfathomable insult bordering on outright batshit insanity that the selection of some previous incumbents has been.
Yes, we all know about the imposition of a ‘glass ceiling’, the away record at certain grounds, the lack of pressure from above, the freezing and falling short at the final hurdle, the popping round to Fergie’s pad in a faded pair of jeans, the derisory £12M bid for peak Baines before he’d even officially taken over at Man Utd, and the (alleged) branding of Blues in a bar as a ‘fucking disgrace’.
However, there really is nothing to be gained from the constant rumination and retreading of old ground. The same stale fossilised arguments that were swirling around 12 fucking years ago being proffered and pushed forward like the point might finally sink in now that the saga has been knocking on for more seasons than Solomon Northup was a slave.
The way I’ve decided to look at is, if given a straight choice between Dyche and Moyes, then I definitely would have gone the same way as the new owners. No matter how stale things got when he was first here, or how much he was mocked immediately after departing, he had (and I believe still has) far more in his managerial locker than Sean Dyche.
The former Burnley boss talked a big game and tried to project defiance but the constant deflection – combined with the playing up of prior difficulties and problems not of his doing – meant his words failed to carry much credence. He never came across like a man determined to get to grips with the biggest footballing gig he’s ever going to have come his way, but rather a man wondering how long until he’s fired from the day he was hired.
One thing that can be said in The Friedkin Group’s favour is that they’ve acted swiftly and decisively. They could have gone the opposite way and attempted to hold out and persevere, like Burnley, who left it far too late to sack Sean Dyche, leaving someone to step in with too few games remaining to turn things around and save them.
The caretaker at Turf Moor picked up 3 wins and 2 draws in 8 games, along with the Manager of the Month award for April, but it was too little, too late. At the point Dyche was dismissed, Burnley had won only 4 games from 30 and lost 5 of their last 6, including a defeat to bottom side Norwich in his final match/flop. Form which should sound ominously familiar to Everton fans.
Obviously, we’ll never know if a creaking-under-pressure Dyche could have pulled a confounding reversal of fortune from his hoop, but it was hardly looking likely… a fact the man himself seemingly held his hands up to in an exit statement issued through the LMA when declaring it was “the right time” for him and Everton to part ways.
TFG would have had a thorough rundown of the first Moyes era, encompassing the highs and lows, along with his managerial record since, but there’s no way they could be expected to be privy to all the finer nuances of a near 23-year back story. KITAP1, ‘knives to a gunfight’, ‘punching above our weight’, floaty Phil Neville fanny passes, sitting back after taking an early lead in an FA Cup Final… none of that means anything to, or would have entered into it for them.
At least this second coming will finally offer a sense of closure for those still cogitating over the same old crap they have been since the Costa Concordia shipwreck.
Moyes will either improve us and see out his contract, before leaving what will likely be his last job in football, with thanks of the non-begrudging kind, minus the nagging feeling the club was merely a stepping stone on the path to his ultimate managerial purpose.
Or, Moyes will fail to meet the demands of his new employers and be sent on his (rather less than) merry way, thereby allowing a multitude of Evertonians with elephantine memories to declare they were right about the ‘dour mingebag’ all along.
My fingers are firmly crossed for the former.