Time to forget about the Champions League?

Rooney: We may rely on him too much already, but with McBride going, he simply must start regularly between now and season's end

We've dared ourselves to dream, but do any of us really now believe deep down that we will be playing Champions League football next season? We've been hanging around the top six for what seems like a glorious eternity this season, but cementing ourselves in the top four has proved beyond us, stumbling as we have at crucial junctures.

Yesterday's miserable attempts to despatch of relegation-haunted West Ham are illustrative once again of that curiously Evertonian trait of mis-placed complacency. A team that we are expected to beat comes to town, and, more often than not, we start at an ambling pace in the expectation of doing enough to win but end up having to scramble for the points through the players' own lack of killer instinct.

Coming from behind may have become a habit recently, but you can't rely on it every time, particularly with a midfield as pedestrian as Everton's. One look at the Newcastle-Chelsea encounter at St James' Park recently showed that what those two sides have in pure ability, David Moyes's team compensates for with sheer commitment. If that commitment isn't there for 45-minute stretches at a time, it's hard to win matches and earn the points that would earn unlikely entry to the playground of Europe's elite.

So it was that one of Everton's better chances to claim three vital points came and went in disappointing fashion. The Hammers, staring the drop to the Nationwide League in the face, were there for the taking. Perhaps their biggest threat to Moyes's side was our nemesis, Les Ferdinand, but even he was kept in check and was substituted late on having failed to score his customary Goodison goal.

With little danger of losing, it was up to Everton to win the game, but an apparent lack of attacking ideas restricted them to a solitary Tomasz Radzinski effort in the first half, a glancing, downward header that David James was able to save, and a handful of clear-cut opportunities in an improved second..

Needing to shake things up at half time, Moyes curiously waited until ten minutes into the second period before making a three-fold change which included Wayne Rooney. Perhaps most worryingly for Everton's European aspirations is the fact that as soon as things aren't going our way, we look to the Wonder Kid to save the day. Given sufficient time on the pitch, he often does make a big enough impact to turn matches in the Blues' favour, but a team with hopes of playing on the Continent next season needs more than an over-reliance on a 17 year-old boy to bail them out when their collective commitment is absent.

Failure to pick up what should have been a guaranteed maximum return against Glen Roeder's team means that Everton have it all to do just remain in the top six let alone stay fourth. With red-hot Newcastle United and improving Manchester United still to come to Goodison and two seemingly impossible games in London against Arsenal and Chelsea, Moyes is going to need every drop of his inspirational coaching skills to gear his players up for the final run-in. And, of course, there's the lottery of the derby match looming next month, by which time we should have a better idea of whether the European dream is still a reality.

With the apparent collapse of the Kings Dock project, unexpected qualification to Europe is the one and only way in which the club can generate some desperately-needed revenue. It is an opportunity that the manager and the players have created themselves, and one that they must not under any circumstances lose. We may not be equipped to survive on the Continent by next season, but our presence there, win or lose, is vital for the club's bank balance and the squad's development.

Of course, there is still everything to play for and although the Blues have now made things exceptionally difficult for themselves, nothing is impossible. The fact that we can take points off every time around us between now and mid-May means that our destiny is in our own hands and that finishing fourth is well within our grasp. It will, however, take a herculean effort and demand every ounce of managerial prowess that David Moyes possesses. It's clear, as already mentioned, that we can't realistically compete with the likes of Arsenal, United and Newcastle at the top of their game, but if we can hustle them out of their stride and record a couple of victories, then the Champions League prize is once again up for grabs.

Lyndon Lloyd
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