Woe, Woe, and thrice Woe

We know the highs...

Evertonians the world over are hurting today as they try to come to terms with possibly the most humiliating defeat Everton have ever suffered in the Third Round of the FA Cup.

Evertonians who feel so strongly about their club and their team are gnashing their teeth in agony over the illogicality that a team 84 places below them in the league rankings could actually win such a game.  That a team which just recently gave up six goals to Bolton and five to Rushden & Diamonds could outplay what was, until the beginning of December, THE form team in the Premiership.

Unbelievable. Inconceivable. Unacceptable. Intolerable.

The reactions are strong and heartfelt.  The wounded pride cannot be assuaged by any mitigations that could explain away or excuse such an abominable defeat.  Surely this is the end of the world as we know it?

Well.... No.  Not exactly.

This was the FA Cup: the greatest knock-out football competition in the world.  One of the things that makes it great is the unexpected result, the Mighty vs the Minnows, the unfathomable upset, the drama and the stories that surround these momentous matches when form and logic are turned on their head.  And because it is a knock-out competition, only one team can win each year.  The 683 other teams that enter, including the 91 other professional league teams, lose sooner or later and must lick their wounds for another year.

The sad thing is that, in the twisted battle of logic needed to sustain the fans' love for their club through such intolerable pain, someone must be blamed.  The bad result gets imputed into a bad performance by the team, which means all the players therefore performed badly, which means the manager failed to prepare them properly.  Which means... etc, etc, ad nauseam.

"They just weren't up for it." 

Is that what those who say it really believed when they watched Niclas Alexandersson celebrate his great equalizer?  As they went mental, did they really, honestly believe that they were watching 11 players who really didn't care?   Bullshit.

Such is the utter twaddle that is written about these sad events, but only after the last minute of the tragedy had been played out.  It only takes a moment.  A ball whipped in from yet another free-kick, a glancing header... and suddenly the hope of a Goodison replay vanishes in the gathering gloom of a sleepy Shropshire backwater, instantly transformed into a seething mass of ecstatic locals going mental. 

We've done it ourselves, remember?  It was the last minute of regular time when Wayne Rooney exploded onto the world of football with a superb strike against Arsenal, then unbeaten Champions and Premiership leaders, shattering their particular crystal edifice.  And the whole of Goodison went completely, totally bananas!  What a great feeling that was.

So, is this really a crisis?  Must David Moyes now be given millions of pounds to buy his way out of trouble?  The transfer window is here as a miraculous saviour: buy, Buy, BUY!

I fervently hope that the real lessons of the last nine months are not squandered in a few weeks of knee-jerk nonsense in the transfer market.  Don't we know that it leads nowhere?  David Moyes is making a few loan moves that will not cost an arm and a leg.  He has proved what he can do with this squad, and I believe he can do it again. 

The team has suffered a number of setbacks and has lost its way.  Injuries, suspensions and lately illness have all taken their toll to a degree much greater than I believe anyone has really admitted.  He has set in place the building blocks for making a good squad out of what are mostly only moderately good players — not the world's footballing superstars.  We cannot afford them, remember.

What we can do is trust that we do have the best young manger in the Premiership.  And that he knows what he's doing.  And that he knows what it is like to experience setbacks, to get over them and to continue moving forward.  I just hope some of that will rub off on the fans who are so desperate for success that they do not seem to be able to deal sensibly with this "unacceptable" result — yes, the worst Third-Round loss ever suffered by an Everton team. 

Well, it happened.  Get over it.  That's what the team has to do, and we must do our part to support them.

Michael Kenrick

©2003 ToffeeWeb, 5 January 2003