Disjointed Blues like a flashback to the Smith era

“It's like watching a Walter Smith team,” said someone on Twitter sometime this past week.

And that made my mind up for me. I'm Koeman Out (of the closet) to declare I want rid of him.

Because it really is like watching a Walter Smith team. Which, when you think about it, is more of an indictment of the club at that time than it is on the man himself.

Walter had his faults but I don't think anyone could accuse him of “not getting us”. For me, he knew what Everton was about and he respected that. He was proud to be the manager of Everton.

But his teams, barring that brief period of optimism when Don Hutchison was on fire and Francis Jeffers looked to real deal, were far from easy on the eye.

Under Smith, we just never got going. Memorable wins were in isolation. There was never a flow or an identity or a style to Smith's teams. Sound familiar?

Moyes, at his best — and as unsuccessful as he ultimately was — would later bring all of those things: there was a period between 2007 and 2010 when you would go to Goodison actually expecting to win 2-0. And we usually did.

But given the dire off-the-field circumstances Smith worked under — who could forget that night Duncan was sold? — it's easy to have sympathy for Smith's lack of flow and identity.

This is not meant as a re-writing of history or a defence of Walter. But it has to be said that even Moyes, back in his younger-redder-taking-the warm-up-in-his-tracksuit days was always magnanimous enough to recognise the difficult job Smith did.

Walter Smith with a £145million war-chest? Smith with the (far from perfect but much improved) “foundations” we now have in place: Moshiri, Finch Farm, new stadium promise and a respected Director of Football for support? Nothing's certain in football but he just might have been in business.

We seem to have so many ‘categories' of footballer in the squad just at the minute: there's the promising youngsters (Davies etc), the veterans (Baines and Jags), the experienced pros bought at different moments for different purposes (Williams, Martina, Stekelenberg), the underperforming £20million men (Schneiderlin, Klaassen), fan favourites in waiting (Keane and Pickford), there's Rooney (in a category of his own), then there are anomalies like Niasse and long term casualties (Seamus and Bolasie). I'm not sure what category the ‘star man' Sigurdsson fit into.

But add all this up and, under Koeman, it seems to total something nearing what my Grandad, who rarely wasted words, used to say during matches in the Smith era: a “load of shite”.

It really does — and with the greatest respect to David Ginola, Jesper Blomqvist, Carl Tiler, Nicolas Alexandersson and Alex Nyarko, it is like watching a Walter Smith team.

See you later, Ronald.

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