Back?  Or Sack?

20 June 2004

Once a Blue...

"I am in charge," he said. "I talked to the players. I always listen to the players. If you think you know everything because you are manager it is a big mistake. You have to be sure the players understand and accept what you are doing."

A new manager arrives... a team playing relegation football under a moribund old Glaswegian suddenly bursts into life... hatfuls of goals are scored (and even more are let in — but let's forget about that...).  And the new manager is proclaimed The Moyessiah.  That's what happened at Everton two long years ago, and ever since, manager David Moyes has worn an impenetrable halo projecting his miraculous powers to polish a turd...

Except that the polish eventually wore off...  Everton's form over the last 18 months has been little short of atrocious.  And last season, the team achieved a new nadir in Everton's long history: the lowest points total in over 100 years.  But, we were assured from all quarters, that was the players' fault.  They don't like having to work hard; they are a bunch of spoilt shirkers on massive salaries who are a disgrace to the shirt and the Club.  That was the common wisdom put about by those in the know as a dismal season for the Toffees plummeted new depths in the last four games once the nagging spectre of relegation and finally been overcome.

Sadly, it seems there is another angle to all this, as the dissection of that dreadful season takes shape with more comments, rumours, and gossip slipping the tight leashes at Goodison Park.  The latest suggestion is that Wayne Rooney will not sign a new contract while David Moyes remains as Everton's manager!  The general feeling amongst the players is that Moyes is an excellent football person but an appalling man-manager; it is his way or no other.  There is no talking to him, and no room to negotiate or discuss ideas. 

The quote at the top of this article, in case you were wondering, comes not from David Moyes, but from Sven Goran Eriksson.  Consider the success Sven has achieved with Rooney and compare that with Rooney's less-than-stellar second season under Moyes, and you start to see a worrying trend... 

• Add to that the short-term contracts offered to fringe players like Peter Clarke and Steve Simonsen — all refused....
• Add in that remarkable comment from Tommy Gravesen, whom Moyes regards as one of Europe's best midfielders; he could playi out his contract or leave this summer if Everton cannot secure better players.
• Add to that the worrying inability of David Moyes and Everton to secure new players.  Ignore for a moment the annoying Rumour Mill, and just add up the ones Moyes has expressed a documented interest in, or actively pursued, who have chosen to go elsewhere. 
• Add to that the new Club policy regarding no long-term contracts for players over 30, which all the fans applauded, but which looks like backfiring badly as Everton risk losing senior players like Unsworth and Radzinski, who's experience could be essential in building a good squad (remember Richard Gough and Dave Watson?). 

Worryingly, it is the senior players who, it is rumoured, have the biggest problem with Moyes — although not exclusively: we can not forget Francis Jeffers, who's career promised so much but who famously fell out with Moyes after being promised a starting role against Spurs, only for Moyes to change his mind before the game.  

And then there is the host of young players (Chadwick, Clarke, Schumacher, Osman) who were assessed and all but dismissed early on in Moyes's tenure, farmed out on ever-longer loans, and given only the briefest of chances to impress in the first team,  Admittedly, this is a harder point to make stick because of the invariable lack of proven quality in the young players that Everton have released.  However, Tony Hibbert's game has demonstrably suffered under Moyes's harsh tutelage. 

In a wider context, we must add in the question of money — which is so critical to Everton's future.  Trevor Birch has been brought in to transform the business side of Everton and allegedly has investors lined up.  However, so the gossip goes, they will only invest if Wayne Rooney is still at the club next year!  The sponsorship deal with Chang Beer, although an attractive one, also seems to have been put on hold (what happened to the widely expected public announcement?) as Rooney's star has risen in the last week.  The Club perhaps believes it will now be able to attract a bigger name and a bigger price for the shirt sponsor. 

Just when we should be celebrating the acclaim one of our prodigy, there are enough signs and mutterings to make the average Evertonian fretful over what might be unfolding during the summer.  How did we get into this mess?  It all comes down to who you want to believe in the end: 

• Is it the Board?  which has now been shrunk down to just the powerhouse members of True Blue Holdings, who seem to have been wringing their hands while the flames have licked at the Club?
   
• Is it the Players?  Those overpaid prima donnas who don't want to work too hard, would rather be golfing or lying in the sun?
   
• Or is it the Manager, an uncompromising perfectionist with a growing history of player bust-ups, who insists the team works ever harder on fitness and effort, while the players under him show every sign of having lost all respect.

If the later is true, and the gossips close to the Club insist that it is, Everton are faced with a series of impossible choices:

1. Back Moyes and roll over the squad as quickly as possible, selling Rooney to solve the money problem while eschewing the waiting investors, and bring in shedloads of money that are essential for Moyes to realise his personal dream of building a squad comprising his own players who will support him and play for him. 
    
2. Sack Moyes, while accepting the incoming investment to support the new manager, while hold of keeping Rooney and the bulk of the squad that played so well in the early months of the Moyes era, but have clearly lost it with their manager.

On balance, it seems that Moyes's days could be numbered.  He should by rights have been given three years at least to prove his worth.  But 18 months of dross is a huge indictment and runs directly counter to his widely admired expertise, commitment and training methods.  It appears a pretty strong bet that he has lost the players; has he also critically lost the faith of the TBH management team?

Michael Kenrick 

Readers' Responses:

'Back him or Sack him' - written like an idiot.  Well done in joining the group of supporters who most of real EFC supporters could do without. — Rob Hillock

Well, thanks for that, Rob.  One sad aspect of supporting Everton is the speed and voracity with which we Evertonians will hurl insults at each other when things are going bad and opinions start to diverge.  It happened in spades when a growing minority of fans saw that Walter Smith was losing his way and had the temerity to speak out about it.  Let's not go there again, please.

If David Moyes is approaching a similar crossroads, does it really make someone less of a supporter if they dare to examine why that may be so?  And to try to understand why there is a faction within the Club that believes it would be better for Everton if David Moyes were to go?   I deeply wish David Moyes could go on to be the manager we all wanted him to be.  But if he can't command the respect of his players (and I emphasize if), that is an impossible situation that should be rectified as soon as possible, in the interests of Everton FC. — Michael Kenrick

As a long-standing admirer of the ToffeeWeb site, I am deeply dismayed by your "article" regarding David Moyes' long-term tenure as the Everton manager.  It's nothing short of scandalous to put together such an editorial piece, the basis of which is pure supposition and "gossip" (your words not mine).

More disappointing still is the hypocrisy the ToffeeWeb team now clearly adopt on this site.  On the same day, we are encouraged to read a feature article (Idiots, morons and cretins) lambasting the media's scurrilous rumour-mongering regarding Wayne Rooney.

I happen to concur with Nick Armitage.  Frankly however, he could easily have applied his article quite easily to your piece.  That's a sad indictment of your decision to publish what you did.

ToffeeWeb, has always adopted a healthy, responsible and objective view on all matters Everton.  That is principally why I, and I imagine many other Evertonians, use this as our main source for information.  The official web site bears the hallmarks of Pravda in early eighties Moscow.

That said, we are all Evertonians.  Evertonians at a time when it is especially challenging to be so.  These are dark days, with more ominous clouds on the horizon.  The Rooney situation is as alarming as it is, not just because of the player himself, but more, the future of our club itself is hanging in the balance.

Evertonians, do not need panacean lies at this point.  However they will be equally poorly served at this time, by alarmist doom-mongering that cannot be properly substantiated.

"Back or sack him". Let's get the facts first. — Michael Nolan

I understand exactly where you are coming from, Michael, and I struggled with the right way to present this given it is fundamentally unpalatable to many Evertonians.  I wish we could wait until we got the facts first but, sadly, then it will all be done and dusted.  There will only be the aftermath and the recriminations to deal with... 

Let's face it: no-one at the Club is going to openly admit that the relationship between Wayne Rooney and David Moyes has broken down.  Yet that is what Glen Moore (an Evertonian, by the way) wrote in The Independent — hardly one of the red-top rag that Nick Armitage rails against, I hope you'd agree.  And no-one at the Club is going to openly admit if there is a massive rift between David Moyes and the players.  All we can go on are the Chinese whispers, of which there are far too many to ignore, in my humble opinion — and that's why I pulled this piece together.

These kinds of revelations put us all in an impossible bind:  Do we believe them?  Or do we ignore them and hope that they will go away?  I tried to steer more of a middle course, taking "What if it is true..." as my basic premise.  I don't know if any of it is true, but there are those 'in the know' who are convinced that much of what went into that article is true.  They are Evertonians too.  We all are. 

Who do you believe?  The choice is of course yours and yours alone.  Thanks for your kind words about ToffeeWeb.  — Michael Kenrick

I really do not agree with the 'Back him or sack him' article.  I understand that this is often about opinions but "18 months of dross" implies that the last half of Moyes' first full season in charge of the club was rubbish.  Yes we did miss out on Europe but only just and I didn't consider most of what I saw that season as 'dross'.  It was the best football I'd seen at Everton, at times, for many years.

Many of these players were underperforming long before David Moyes arrived.  Duncan Ferguson being the most prominent, but there are plenty of others as well.  Under managers Smith, the 3rd Kendall spell, Walker and often under Royle we experienced dross.  There comes a point when multiple managers have experienced the same thing you have to stop and think... hold on, perhaps it isn't the manager after all.

And what a surprise, the newspapers are spreading gossip and rumours.  I am not in the least surprised to hear now that Rooney and Moyes have had a bust up.  That is so predictable it's ridiculous.  It isn't that long ago the agent for Rooney was quoted as saying "Rooney wants to stay at Everton, we want him to stay at Everton, a deal will be done".  Remember the original deal didn't happen overnight so the fact that this one hasn't either really isn't a surprise.  By the way these are the same newspapers that told us our soldiers were beating up Iraqis and showed us pictures of 4 people locked in a van in Margate High Street as 'proof'.

David Moyes is an outstanding manager, he arrived at the club with credentials and proved in his first year that when the players put the required effort in the results will follow.  The fact that the players have slipped back into their old ways simply because they know full well that our hands are tied and we're stuck with most of them is not Moyes' fault. — Andy 

Well, as I implied, you can choose to believe it is all the fault of the players, and that is a widely held belief.  What I was trying to do is turn the glass around and take a look from the other side.  There is enough evidence to suggest now that David Moyes, who showed during his first 10 months with the club that he could be an outstanding manager, is encountering very serious problems with the players.  No, that he has been for most of this dreadful season just gone — perhaps even earlier.

As I said, whether you believe that is true is up to you.  Or whether you believe it is all the fault of the players, as for example, Colm Kavanagh has maintained; it is up to you.  No-one who actually knows is going to tell us. — Michael Kenrick

©2004 ToffeeWeb