Fans Comment
Andy McNabb

Less Choice than a Welsh Fish and Chip Shop!
17/04/06

I must admit, I laughed like the rest of the audience but never really understood the reasoning behind that particular one liner. Why chip shops in Wales should be worse than anywhere else escapes me for the moment but the context was that the Red Dwarf team were in a tight spot, with few alternatives.

Cue the Tottenham game at Goodison on Saturday. Mido has a groin strain, so Defoe steps up to take his place. Defoe has been cooling his heels on the bench in recent weeks and yet he stands a much greater chance of travelling to Germany than our number one striker, Beattie. Spurs have an injury to a key player and are able to replace him with one of the best young strikers in the country. We lose a key player like Arteta and we replace him with… well, who do we replace him with?

“The rich get rich and the poor get children.” - ‘The Great Gatsby’

Oh boy, somebody has moved the goalposts, big time. I was introduced to someone this morning, who turned out to be a Chelsea fan. He has lived out in Australia for 13 years and after the usual moaning about not being able to get home to our respective grounds these days, we reflected on the current state of our clubs. Chelsea could win the Premiership on Monday against us and I ended up reminiscing about our last Championship success.

Travelling to Norwich without a ticket in 1987 to watch the boys clinch the Championship with a nerve-jangling performance. It really struck me for the first time, that I was sounding like an old man. This Chelsea fan could reel off all the names, Ratcliffe, Sharp, Reid, Southall etc but that was almost 20 years ago!

I remember at the time, Don Howe saying on ‘Grandstand’ that we needed to “Get that lad back who plays on the left…” if we were to clinch the title. He was talking about Sheedy, who subsequently did recover and was indeed vital to our chances. These days, the top clubs have several Sheedys. If you lose one to injury/loss of form etc, you just get another one out of the box.

The gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ gets bigger every season. It makes me cringe when Sky Sports proclaim the Premiership as the most exciting league in the world. That comment in the ‘Guardian’ this year describing it as a hay dash between the stallion, the mule and the maimed goat was never more true. We have to face reality when we admit we are amongst the ‘have-nots’ and no amount of whinging about Moyes’s lack of success in the transfer market is going to alter that.

Let’s face it, the only reason we got Arteta was that he was an Ibrox reject. Well done, Davey, for spotting a bargain. Now our management team has worked with the player, developing his confidence and giving him the chance to show his undoubted talent, making him the focal point in an improving side. What’s the return for all this effort? Well, we see him slipping in the side door at Old Trafford. I suppose that will also end up being Moyes’s fault. As in the case of Rooney, he wouldn’t want to hang on to a talented player, now would he?

“One moment you’re down, the next, you’re right back up again…” - Arnold Rimmer, ‘Red Dwarf, Tikka to Ride’

Alright, so I enjoy ‘Red Dwarf’ but it makes a simple, important point: Life is full of ups and downs — nowhere more so than competitive sport. However, the sale of Gary Speed to Newcastle a number of years ago appears to have set a downward trend from which successive managers have found it impossible to break free. For a variety of reasons, our best players move elsewhere.

Speed, Matterazzi, Ball, Ferguson, Collins, Barmby, Hutchison, Dacourt, Jeffers, Kanchelskis, Rooney, Gravesen, Arteta? Yobo? It makes for depressing reading. The net of blame has been cast fairly wide but asking Managers (and yes, I include Walter Smith in this category) to create a consistently successful team in that environment is demanding the impossible.

I have never understood the clamour for our players to represent their country. Prestige for the club? Rubbish! All that happens is that they are then coveted by other clubs with deeper pockets and we end up losing them. If that scenario doesn’t arise, then grimy fingered agents or the international dressing room gossip about wages gets to them and unsettles players who had hitherto appeared happy to do something for which the rest of us would give our right arm.

“There are five tests, so I expect to win 5-0…” - Glenn McGrath

Yes, it has been great living in Australia, when we got the Ashes back, although to be fair, the vast majority of Aussies took it on the chin. However, it was an unwise thing to say and one that Glenn will not be allowed to forget in a hurry. How about some other unfortunate quotes?

“In Moyes we trust.” ... “This man is the Moyesiah!”

The more we built him up, the further he had to fall. The football fan is a dreamer. Deep down, we all hope with such passion that it tends to breed belief but this has to be sprinkled with some fragment of reality.

If you type ‘Everton’ into a Google image search, you will find a picture of a floppy disc labelled, “Everton European Highlights 2005, available September.” Yes, it came from a Kopite website but European qualification was all too much, too soon. I remember both our children starting to walk. There was great excitement in the house but if my wife and I had demanded they sprint for 100m rather than being happy with their first stumbling steps, it would have caused all sorts of problems with confidence and thus performance. Ring any bells, anyone?

Perhaps we, in common with many supporters, can confuse encouragement with weakness and view reality as simply a lack of ambition. Many years on, I can still see our 11/12 month olds taking their first steps down the hallway and regularly falling fairly and squarely on their bottoms. I hoped and dreamed for better things and now I’m left behind by both of them but those first faltering steps had to be taken, in order for the building blocks of progress to move into place.

So many of us feel we have stolen a march on other teams in the league. We’ve been in Europe, won championships etc etc so we don’t have to start at the start. Well sadly, we do. The goal posts have well and truly moved and we have to begin all over again, this time in an even more difficult environment.

In connection to the ‘Moyesiah’ theme and at this time of Easter, in our super sophisticated 21st Century Football league. If players can still cross themselves, touch the grass as they run onto the pitch, kiss rings, pull their shorts on last every week and wear a particular colour of undies, perhaps, just perhaps, there’s room for one more quotation:

“You shall have no other gods before me… For I, the Lord your God am a jealous God…” - Exodus 20 vv 3 & 5

It always intrigued me how quickly the careers of Robbie Fowler (‘God’ to the Kop) and Matt Le Tissier (bowed down to by many Southampton fans) disappeared into oblivion shortly after this adulation. Thoughts, anyone?

Maybe one good thing to emerge from what has been perceived as a disappointing season will be a slightly more realistic view of Season 2006-07. We need to get it into our heads. Finishing in the top ten would be a step forward. Have we forgotten already the Wimbledon and Coventry last gasp escapes? Moyes isn’t the Moyesiah and it’s no fault of his that he isn’t a magician either. He’s an individual, who makes mistakes but gets it right more often than not and I defy anyone to find a better Manager, who would be willing to accept this particular challenge.

I also rate Martin Jol, who has just visited Goodison with a much better team. Does that make him a better Manager, or is it just that he has been able to go out and offer transfer fees and wages to top quality players, of which our Manager can only dream?

We used to say that British athletes achieved success despite, rather than because of the system. I believe Moyes is in a similar situation. At a ‘big’ club, with ‘big’ expectations, I personally believe that what he has achieved, if only in the department of developing consistency, is a huge step forward.

Next time we are tempted to moan and groan and look beyond him to where the grass is always greener, we need to take a deep breath and assemble a list of realistic alternatives who are guaranteed to succeed. Short list, isn’t it? The fact is, we have to choose a jockey for our mule or maimed goat. Neither is a particularly attractive option but one thing is for sure — we aren’t the stallion!
Andy McNabb


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