Poor start scuppered Everton's 2014-15 campaign

ItÂ’s a good job we donÂ’t have another ten games as weÂ’ve lost three of our last four fixtures, including two at Goodison. Ross has looked like a little boy lost for all of this season and nothing like the player we saw last season. Mind you another ten games may have been enough to decide if Roberto was the right man for the job or not.

Take United away, how they won that is beyond me but from that point on in the league we looked shot of confidence and belief. Martinez stuck to his plan, some of the players would have questioned him, possibly? We donÂ’t know what went on behind the scenes but it didnÂ’t play out well on the pitch.

But heÂ’s right, once we needed to get results we did and from what heÂ’s saying it sounds as though theyÂ’ve all been on a learning curve. As the great flying German winger once said Â’what doesnÂ’t kill you makes you strongerÂ’.

Moan and complain all you want but the man is here next season and I can assure you he doesnÂ’t want a repeat of this season.

The pre season games told everything about this season. Leaking goals and pace of games did not change all season. However, after last season 2013-14, 5th place, another chance is required based on your honesty of this season.

The coming season: no summer tournament, no Europa League, no excuses.

It was his job to pick the players up, no matter how they felt about the opening games, it was his job to address the loose defence in the opening quarter of the season, it was his job to pick 100% fit players and the formation which best suited those players. It is his job to ensure that the team go into every game at the best physical and mental level that they can be and then give maxiumum effort in gaining results for the club.

If dropped points in the opening part of the season seriously de-railed our season, it doesnÂ’t say much about the phenomenal characters in the dressing room does it?

Plenty of people are giving Martinez a lot of credit for doing this inteview, but IÂ’m not one of them. I and many others go to Goodison to see a football match and mostly to watch Everton play and that is the only evidence I require to judge whether the man in charge is up to the job or not, a bucketful of reasons as to why they didnÂ’t play to the required level doesnÂ’t make me feel any better in some ways it makes me feel worse and this interview has cemented my view that this man shouldnÂ’t be running our club.

Absolute rubbish.

Surely our Manager must hold his hands up and take the blame?! Roberto does not learn from his mistakes, he signed Kone and Alcaraz twice! Need I say more?

What did he do? Just stand there going Â’Ah well. What can I do, the seasonÂ’s almost gone already.Â’

Get the hairdryer out, get a response. Sir Alex Ferguson after Utd lost the league to City in injury time, he galvanised his players, saying Â’Never forget this moment. This will make you better playersÂ’. He picked them up and got a response out of them. Won the league at a canter the following season.

I donÂ’t think Martinez has those motivational skills. If it took so long to get over 3 games, that just shows his inability to get a response from his players.

I along with many others on this site had major doubts about our fitness before we even kicked a ball in the league. This isnÂ’t hindsight, yet heÂ’s refusing to acknowledge his role in this. It was the most shambolic pre season I can remember in recent years and Moyes didnÂ’t exactly cover himself in glory on that front!

Simply put, we dropped points and made mistakes because we werenÂ’t fit and thatÂ’s a disgrace.

Actually in the first 2½ months of 2015 (until mid-March) we played 9 league games and took only 8 points, winning just 1 - the lucky away win against Crystal Palace when we were outplayed.

The fact is had we not (thankfully) had a pathetic Newcastle team visit GP on 15th March followed by playing a slightly less pathetic QPR team afterwards (who we were also lucky to beat), we would have been in deep deep trouble! Thankfully these two wins lifted the pressure and allowed us to get decent results in April – as the players also went more direct.

Every time – he just comes out with excuses and more excuses. Not one admission of doing anything wrong. It’s always down to something or someone else, never him, his tactics, style or philosophy.

His comments on Barkley are just baffling.

Last season, we desperately needed an out-and-out striker with goals in him and we managed to keep hold of Lukaku. BUT.. We realised it just wasnÂ’t enough to take our team to the next level. Serious investment is required up and down the park to get us even close to where we were RM.

If I was Bill, IÂ’d snatch Big Sam in a flash to take over the reins (as much as I canÂ’t stand him) but he would be a necessary evil that IMHO wouldnÂ’t squander what little money weÂ’ll have. Yes we needed a Lukaku but it will take a lot more to move on.

For Everton FC, the best of the rest and overachieving tags may be discarded if we have a bad season, the stability of Moyes now the scales can easily tilt either way, lower half of the table obscurity or the return to the ambitious challenges for the Top 6.

For Roberto, he had a great season then the second season was not very good at all bar the Man Utd game at home. Roberto was being tipped for the Arsenal job last summer, if this season is repeated will any major club even consider him in the future if we repeat this season again?

I still think we stayed up due to the crowd turning things round at the Kiev home match. That night the Â’PhilosophyÂ’ went out the window.

I was surprised to still see him here in May, I thought he was a goner. But he starts next season as our manager. Now weÂ’ll see what heÂ’s made of. If things donÂ’t get any better heÂ’ll be gone and would need a miracle to get a club of our size again in the future.

Interesting times ahead. If thereÂ’s no money to buy the 3-4 good players needed (at least) I canÂ’t see our luck changing. ItÂ’s all on the line now for Roberto, itÂ’s win or bust. You simply canÂ’t stand still in this league...

If he was given leadership and guidance from a good coach IÂ’m sure weÂ’d see a different player.

Then of course the other high budget teams will maintain their positions in the top six which means, unless we get extremely lucky a top ten place will be a real achievement.

First itÂ’s the World Cup, then the early draws, then itÂ’s Barkley's injury. Surprised the tea lady hasnÂ’t been blamed. That will be this week's blame game.

None of our senior pros seem to be the type to galvanise the troops when things are going wrong (Jagielka, Howard, Baines, Barry, Distin) so I am not surprised to hear him say he felt we never recovered from the early season set backs.

Mental toughness canÂ’t be bought. Nor can a winning mentality. Installing it after last season is going to be MartinezÂ’s biggest challenge.

Martinez has made mistakes, everyone does, but the telling stat is we havenÂ’t won anything for 20 years... there must be a reason why!

Look whoÂ’s occupying the top 6 places again; sure, we finished 5th last season but can we really hope for more? I donÂ’t think so. IÂ’m not trying to be a killjoy, just a realist; unless we get new owners, nothing will change.

It's a poor state of affairs... such a well-supported club such as ours deserves more.

With Roberto, we have a manager trying to play football that requires a much higher skill level than we have or are ever likely to have. ThatÂ’s the real gripe; IÂ’m certain, as well, if Robert was at Barcelona, he would be a disaster.

Oh dear, it sounds even worse when he lets it slip, doesnÂ’t it?

We had a manager of the type you mention for 10 years & he got dogs abuse on here.

So, after three or four games when they blew 2 points at Leicester, 2 points at home to Arsenal they get absolutely pummeled at home to Chelski and he blames the totally abysmal season on that!!! Only the few good scorelines in Europa concealed the fact that all was not well.

The big question is why was he not able to correct the problems and by the end of the year why did BK not act? The answer can only be that RM did not have what it takes to motivate and/or change the system to at least make them a more solid defensive unit.

He actually had the whole season to improve things and didnÂ’t, so the team actually ended up as the same tired clueless bunch after flirting with the relegation battlers.

How can we possibly believe he can do anything different next season?

I feel sorry for the good fans who have already invested in season tickets as they have had fair warning. He has already hinted at Kone being the striking cover which is ludicrous and Mirallas is not top class in my opinion.

Lukaku cannot play on his own and needs a top class partner and if he thinks Barry and Osman have a good season left in them then he is delusional.

Maybe Besic and Oviedo can finally stake a claim but somehow I think the usual suspects will still be around.

And I doubt Roberto is the right man anyway no matter how much money we could spend, heÂ’s hardly a tactical genius.

Sooner or later, we will revert back to a Moyes type manager; hard work and a strong team spirit is the only way to go, whilst thereÂ’s no real money being invested in the club.

I have struggled to raise much enthusiasm for this season, although I have spent a lot of time and money hoping that the next game will be better. But on the whole it wasnÂ’t.

Leicester looked likely to be relegated and yet Nigel Pearson turned it around and they finished 6 points behind us. Crystal Palace were in a sorry state before Alan Pardew arrived and yet they finished one point above us. West Brom were floundering under Alan Irvine and then Tony Pulis turns it around and they finish three points behind us. Stoke and Swansea finished above us and can we honestly say that they have better players?

We finished 13 points behind Southampton, who sold a lot of their established players, lost a good manager and yet still turned around a potentially difficult season. And 15 points behind Liverpool who everyone seems to agree had a disappointing season and flattered to deceive when it came to the big games is a travesty.

I look forward to seeing the headline that Martinez has resigned (as sacking him would cost too much money... although thatÂ’s a price that I feel is worth paying). In the last few years of Moyes, I wanted him out as it felt stagnant and I liked MartinezÂ’s positivity but was equally concerned about his lack of defensive tactics and that was his achilles heel.

After the openness of the early press conferences, I now cringe at some of the delusional psychobabble that Martinez spouts and (almost) yearn for the dour post-match assessments from Moyes and Walter Smith...

The full text of RobertoÂ’s words are: If you canÂ’t blind them with science then baffle them with bullshit.

Martinez has given up on the first part and is now ladling out the second part to awe-struck listeners.

While I am on about it, did any of the gullible raise the issue of him commentating on the Euro Championship?

Other teams sent players to the World Cup, and seemed to cope okay on their return. Other teams played in Europe, and coped okay back home in the league. He talks about the first three games of the season basically being the root cause of all that followed. I actually thought we played some decent enough football in those three games, at least going forward, with Naismith on fire as a goal scorer, but yes, they did show up our defensive frailties.

Having seen those frailties at an early stage of the season, a half-decent manager would have made it a priority to tighten things up in defence, work on where we were going wrong, change the tactic of playing out from the back, remotivating the players involved but did we witness any of those things?

No, right from the beginning he started rolling out the excuses, always blaming bad luck, poor refereeing decisions, tiredness from the World Cup, etc, etc, etc. We should have realised way back then that Martinez had no idea how to correct things.

HeÂ’s a flim-flam merchant of the highest degree, and why he was allowed to keep his job after the appalling run up to Christmas, IÂ’ll never know. Most Premier League clubs would have got rid of a manager in such a situation but we allowed him to blunder on and to be honest, we were dragged into relegation fight that luckily, we managed to escape with half a dozen games to go.

It was that close, and thank God we had that good run when we did, because if weÂ’d still been down there at the time when Leicester and Sunderland started fighting hard to retain their status, we could have ended up going down.

I certainly bear no hope or optimism for another season with Martinez at the helm. HeÂ’s steering us straight for the rocks, and I can only see us getting worse the longer heÂ’s in charge. My one-year-old granddaughter could probably do a better job!