Confidence is Key - James McFadden
Player Feature - 23 September, 2004

James McFadden: After an impressive start at Goodison his form has flagged along with his confidence.

When we polled our readers following the 2003 transfer deadline asking them which was the best of the four last-minute signings David Moyes made that day, James McFadden was the clear favourite with 56% of the vote.  Nigel Martyn, signed at the age of 37, received only 2% of the vote; Kevin Kilbane managed only 6% and the already-departed Francis Jeffers collected the remaining 36%.

Bizarrely, the degree of success attained by those four players has, so far, gone in reverse of the fans' expectations.  Martyn was the clear choice for 2003-04 Player of the Season, with Kilbane second choice, and even Jeffers managed a few goals and a handful of appearances before returning to Highbury without the permanent contract he was hoping for at Goodison.  McFadden, the player whom we all thought would out-shine the other three, has clearly struggled to find his feet in the Premiership despite the reputation he brought to Goodison from Motherwell.

James McFadden had been linked with Everton in the spring of 2003 but nothing came initially of the speculation.  Moyes had obviously cast his eye over the player who had set Fir Park alight with consistently electric performances and glittering collection of goals.  At 20 years old, he was attracting the attention of the Glasgow giants and Scotland as a whole so it was seen as something of a coup when Everton landed him for £1.5M on the last day of player trading in August.

Moyes proclaimed that the People's Club could now boast both England and Scotland's best young prospects in Wayne Rooney and McFadden.  As part of the manager's long-term strategy of founding the side he is building on youth, the future looked very bright for the Blues.

Now, of course, Rooney is plying his trade at Manchester United and McFadden's domestic career is in danger of stalling given the fact that he has yet to play 90 minutes of Premiership football this season, is still searching for his first goal in a Blue jersey and, in the space of four days, has just failed to score two of the easiest opportunities he is likely to get to break that scoring hoodoo.  The murmurings from the skeptics among the Goodison faithful are getting louder, with an increasing number of fans now predicting he is more like to emulate John Oster that someone like Pat Nevin or Everton legend Kevin Sheedy.

The fact that the Scot is being compared with the likes of those afore-mentioned players says much about McFadden's struggle to assert himself at Everton.  They were all wide players but McFadden sees himself predominantly as a striker.  As if to support that belief, he struggled when Moyes deployed him on the wing for the first 8 months of last season but sparked to life in mid-April when he played up front in a 3-1 destruction of Tottenham during which he tormented the Spurs defence.

McFadden: Being in and out of the first team hasn't helped his cause.

Since then, Moyes has used him up front in the three matches in which he has used the enigmatic Scottish international: for 45 frustrating minutes against Arsenal after which he was substituted; nine-plus minutes against Middlesbrough when he ran half the length of the pitch with just the goalkeeper to beat but allowed Mark Schwarzer to nab the ball off his toe; and 42 minutes at Bristol City before he was to move wide when Leon Osman went off injured and Nick Chadwick was brought into the attack.  On all three occasions he failed to produce the kind of performance that would stake his claim for a first-team place, although had the 83rd-minute penalty he took that could have spared the Blues extra-time and penalties not been saved by Bristol's Steve Phillips, things might be very different for McFadden today.

Instead of being the cup hero, "Jamie Mac" has a good number of fans questioning whether he can make it at Everton.

Personally, I'm desperate for the lad to succeed with the Blues simply because we don't have another player with his natural flair and ability on our books.  Unfortunately, he seems to be the ultimate confidence player who will need a decent run in the side in order to settle in and get to grips with life in the top flight.  The reality is that most Premiership managers simply don't have the luxury of allowing players five or ten games to acclimatise, which is unfortunate.

Moyes, however, has to decide — and it looks as though he has made his mind up for the time being — whether having McFadden in the team up front with Marcus Bent (which is the fans' preferred striking partnership if our recent poll is any indication) is a better option than the five-man midfield he has employed for the past three league games.  If it were me, I would play McFadden up front because the 4-5-1 formation, as successful as it has been so far, is uncomfortably defensive, especially at home.  However, given the fact that Chadwick found the net within two minutes of coming on at Ashton Gate probably makes him the more likely candidate to start in a 4-4-2 line-up than McFadden.

So where does that leave Everton's number 11?  Curiously, he has been electric ever since he broke into Motherwell's first team and his form on the international stage is the polar opposite to his experience thus far at Goodison Park.  A first-choice striker and the scorer of some crucial goals for Scotland — not least his first that came against Holland in an ultimately fruitless Euro 2004 qualifying play-off match last autumn — McFadden is already a favourite of the Tartan Army.  And yet he cannot replicate that form at club level for Everton.

At Motherwell, he scored 29 times in 67 appearances and was head and shoulders the best player at Fir Park before making the move down south.  And his performances for Everton last season may have been erratic but he did show plenty of glimpses of his potential.  Usually reduced to appearances as a substitute when the team was struggling, he often provided an entirely new dimension to the side. His 11-minute debut at Middlesbrough and the back-to-back defeats at Blackburn and Bolton last season are some occasions that spring to mind; McFadden's introduction as a sub brought about an immediate improvement.  While he couldn't single-handedly turn the game in our favour, he was instrumental in Everton getting sufficient momentum to pull a goal back at Ewood Park in a 2-1 defeat and helped restore a measure of hitherto unlikely respectability to the Blues in the 2-0 reverse at the Reebok Stadium.

While it is a harsh reality that you don't get much time to prove yourself in the Premiership, McFadden really has had very little opportunity to strike a vein of form in his favoured position in attack.  During the run of games during which he was regularly involved in some capacity between September and early January last season, he only started a handful of games and in all of them he played in midfield.  Furthermore, the team as a whole was struggling to find consistency, so he was not alone.  When he was used as a striker against Spurs he was a revelation but was dropped for the next game when Rooney became available — hardly confidence-building or conducive to building up a head of steam.

When this season's August transfer deadline rolled around, McFadden was linked with a return north of the Border to Ibrox... but, with the player away on international duty, the speculation proved to be false.  However, it did raise questions in the fans' minds whether Everton would miss him if he were to move on.

International success: McFadden's Goals and great displays for Scotland have not so far carried over to Goodison Park

That is unfortunate because it should be remembered that McFadden is still only 21.  Leon Osman is only now making the grade at first-team level at the age of 23 and he largely has a loan spell in the old Nationwide First Division at Derby County to thank for the manner in which he has developed over the past year.  If he isn't going to get the first-team action he needs at Everton even with a striking position open alongside Bent, a temporary spell away from Goodison may just be what McFadden needs to kickstart his flagging Blues career.

Clearly the lad needs confidence.  If he scores the penalty for which he bravely volunteered and won the cup tie against Bristol City, everything is different and he comes back to Merseyside on a high ready for potential action at Portsmouth this coming weekend.  The fact that he had the courage to step up and take another spot-kick in the decisive shoot-out — and score — seems to have been forgotten already in the rush to write him off in the wake of that terrible miss against 'Boro on Sunday.

McFadden has obvious talent — his performances for Scotland are testament to the fact that he does have what it takes at the top level.  What he must do now is take what he has learned from his time at Everton and apply that the next time he gets his chance (although, quite when that will be all depends on the faith his manager has in him); release the ball sooner, not try to take on too many players or the same man too many times; and rediscover his killer instinct.  All that will come from confidence which will only come from regular first-team action and support from the fans.  He's got mine, but will the majority of the Goodison faithful afford him the time and patience as well?

Lyndon Lloyd