Fans Comment
Kevin Gillen

Despair and Disillusionment
26 August 2004

In the Summer, I was rightly proud to be an Evertonian, despite the shameful capitulation of the team towards its lowest points total in the premiership.  Rooney’s performances at Euro 04 were breathtaking.  He was one of us, a street kid, a true scouser, a working-class hero in the making and he was ours, not in the sense that we owned him, but in the sense that he was of us.

Last year, I warned all my friends that he was a time bomb waiting to go off in our face; the previous year I had warned everyone that we were about to witness the emergence of the greatest talent to appear on these shores since George Best.  I felt last year that there was an inevitability about Rooney’s demise as an Everton icon.  He had become bigger than the club.  He was also singularly ill-equipped to deal with the explosion in interest his success generated.  The shameful exploitation of Rooney by agents and the media was bound to take him from Everton.  The well-intended but amateur exploits of Blue Bill and David Moyes to protect and preserve Rooney as an Everton player have patently failed.

Rooney’s shameful statement to the press, his innocent attempts to preserve his sweetheart relationship, his crude and naïve attempts to fumble his way through to manhood via Liverpool brothels must be creating great anxiety and shame for his friends, family and supporters.  One begins to suspect that some very powerful forces have carefully orchestrated his removal from Everton.

Where will this leave Everton?  It is confirmation of what we all knew that we are now a third-rate power in the Premiership. A country mile behind the top three, a further mile behind the Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham, Middlesboro, Tottenham, Villa clubs.  I was thinking which Man United or Newcastle players could we have in part exchange for Rooney and then it struck me that no player in their right mind would leave their club for Everton.  The money will have to be cash.  Fulham and Charlton are better than us at the moment, they can attract better players than we can; that’s a sobering reality.

Moyes must take some of the blame for the current situation.  His failure to improve the club in his second season has meant that players across Europe are very unlikely to see the club as realistically challenging for European football.  Without that carrot he is going to find it hard to secure the services of the best European or African players.

The cash I fear will never buy another Rooney, in reality £30M is cheap.  Paul Gregg will want his wife’s money out and Blue Bill’s rescue plan involving millions of laundered roubles will only attract the Finnans and Traorés of this world.  We will be another team of “never mind the quality, feel the width”.  The X-factor Rooney has brought to the team in the past two seasons will be gone; in many fixtures we will have conceded before we go onto the pitch.  If we underachieve this year, how will we even be able to attract players of quality?  The out-of-contract players – many of whom we will be glad to see the back of – will be difficult to replace, however ironic that seems.

What happens to all those parents who have been duped into buying Rooney 18 shirts in the blue colours?  In my house we have four.  Do we now tune in to Man United and cheer them on in the Champions League when Rooney scores?  How do I explain to my 7- and 4-year-olds that I don’t want them to cheer for Man United?

I feel betrayed.  I have some sympathy for Rooney but it only runs so far.  Whatever happened to loyalty?  To commitment?  Rooney’s refusal to sign another contract, to publicly declare his position at Everton, to align himself with agents hostile to Everton FC’s interests is the same sordid strain that landed him on the front pages of the Sunday tabloids with his pants down.  I feel bitterness towards the whole sordid football industry, to the management and administration at EFC and to Rooney and his advisors.

There are other sports I can spend my hard earned cash on or encourage my children to support that send out a better or different message about what is important in life.  Friendship, camaraderie, honour, humility, trust, honesty, openness, fidelity, endeavour; I find all of these virtues corrupted by this whole sordid affair.

Christmas is approaching and the annual money spent on Everton shirts will have to go elsewhere this year.  My 11-year-old has shirts with Radzinski, Jeffers and Rooney emblazoned on the back.  This year I’m thinking of buying him one with Judas written on the back, after all he eventually did the only honourable thing left to him.  I can’t bring myself to have a shirt with Hibbert (not good enough), Stubbs (past it seriously), Naysmith (not good enough), Gravesen (won’t be here for very long), Kilbane (remember Sunderland), Carsley (funnier than Harry Hill), Campbell or Ferguson (bleeding the club dry), so I’m only left with Yobo or Bent, both of which don’t lend themselves easily to being adorned on your back despite them obviously being two of our best players.

It will take me and my family a long time to recover from this one.  It is shameful that the admission to Goodison has been raised 20-25% following the club’s worst ever premiership performance and patent mismanagement of its prize asset.

I remain a steadfast blue and hope for better times but it is a very bleak outlook and I am very, very disillusioned almost to the point of allowing my children to support other clubs, something I hoped I would never admit.

Kind regards to all fellow Evertonians in these miserable times.

Kevin Gillen