Long-Term Hope Versus Short-Term Panic

It’s been a crap start to the season… we all agree on that. The best seasons are nearly always based on riding the momentum of a good start to the season and fixture lists at the start of campaigns don’t come much kinder than the one we were faced with. So even just six games in it undoubtedly feels like a great chance wasted already.

But my question is, do we have the right to expect better? It’s an argument I have heard a lot lately… “We are Everton”, “we’re not Wolves or Leicester”, “with the money we’ve spent there’s no excuses”, etc etc. All understandable, all from rightly passionate fans who have the right to be ambitious for our club but (puts tin hat on) is this starting to run the risk of being counter-productive? Is the very argument that we should not be putting a ceiling on our ambitions actually unwittingly restricting us?

I’m a Marc Silva fan; always have been. I accept one day he will be sacked, though, and people will throw this argument back in my face. But lately to me his rhetoric seems to have been deliberately construed to attempt to pacify or at least engage with the portion of our fan base who like to quote the motto on our badge. Now, I have never been one to bother much about a manager’s words and ultimately everything comes back to performances and results on the pitch, of course, but the Silva I wanted and admire is the one who relishes working with the players on the training ground, who does not concern himself too much with outside expectations, who places the team above everything.

On the pitch right now we are struggling to see any sign of a patented Silva style; possibly naively, I don’t think this is a representation of a lack of work on training ground but more a lack of confidence in players, key injuries (my kingdom for a fit and firing André), and, arguably, a lack of cohesion around the place that is caused by confused or unrealistic expectations.

Farhad Moshiri, Marcel Brands, these fellas seem the real deal and compared with where we were in the last days of the Bill-only era have brought a much-welcomed reinvigorated sense of hope for the club. I firmly believe we will get the ground built, Moshiri will continue to fund us very well and won’t rest until we are realistic trophy contenders. And Brands seems to be a man with a long-term plan having already done a great job shifting so much dead wood out and lowering the age of the squad.

But my key point is, how do we get from where we stand right now to be in that trophy challenging position? If you try to make that leap too quickly before you are ready you run the risk of not reaching and falling into a hole and putting yourself back years, which is arguably what we did when we entrusted Steve Walsh and Ronald Koeman with THAT spending spree. Now, as a mere fan, I suspect Moshiri has rightly felt the burn from that and whilst continuing to fund the club well and back his managers, the focus was put on Brands to sort those outgoings to facilitate the incomings and another massive spree will have to wait to be built on much firmer foundations. Now this may seem hugely unambitious to some, but I think 3-4 seasons of 7th-10th finishes would be a decent enough foundation. Yes, we would all like to see continuous improvement and an upward curve only but that is, to me, wishful thinking. The hated “top 6” clubs aren’t going to run out of money any time soon so as unsexy as it is, sometimes you do need to spend a decent amount of money to stand still which is just about where we are.

“We need a winner’s mentality. Can’t accept losing to Sheff Utd at home and Bournemouth away”. Well, yes, again, in an ideal world but in the real world today what do these words mean? Do you get a winner’s mentality just by deciding you need one? By getting extra angry because you lost at home to a newly-promoted team not an established one? By signing Fabian Delph who is more vocal on pitch than most and has won a few things for another team lately? No, it needs developing over time on and off the pitch.

We need to be looking at ourselves. With the possible exception of top two, everyone in the league is at risk of losing games at home if they don’t perform well and often do. The lower you go down the table the more the season is naturally full of peaks and troughs. And though we have got a decent home record last few seasons and have taken steps to make it a harder place again for teams to come, our squad is far from one that I expect a consistent level of high performance from YET.

We have two young strikers who are taking turns at leading the line for a top-10 Premier League club with very high expectation levels and relatively poor service. No easy task but it’s fair to say that in two to three years it’s not unrealistic to expect one of them to be hitting 15 Premier League goals a season. We would all like goals now but going out spending big bucks on an experienced striker who leads the line for an international team (say Turkey!) isn’t going to guarantee an all-round performance leading line with goals to boot either and isn’t going to fit into Brands’s remit of lowering age and increasing resale value.

Richarlison, Jordan Pickford, André Gomes… all very good players now, all very likely to be much better in 2-3 years. Now, sadly, we may lose one or two of them along way to their own ambition to go to Champions League clubs but if and when we do we are going to charge top dollar and no doubt reinvest the money, hopefully wisely.

The centre of defence undoubtedly needs adding to and improving with some pace, but the Silva and Brands track record of signings allows confidence that we spend we will spend wisely. The wings and full-back positions are relatively well-stocked presuming that Jonjoe Kenny or Djibril Sidibé can prove to be the replacement for Seamus Coleman. The Gylfi Sigurdsson conundrum will come to a head sooner or later though, and at some point either a younger quicker No 10 will be needed or we will switch to Silva’s presumed preferred 4-3-3 formation.

This is assuming that Silva stays, of course, but to me to get season on season consistency the best chance has to be to keep him and to allow him to try to complete the jigsaw, something that very few managers get the chance to do. Of course, there has to be a base level of results to allow this and of course a new manager MAY improve results but in percentage chances a long term plan surely has a better chance of succeeding?

So what is success? Winning a cup this year? Finishing top 4 next year? Not to me no; they are bonuses which, of course, could happen — please God — but to progress the club, they are not what you base a successful strategy on. Realistic, tangible success is to carry on finishing top 10 each year; with a fair wind and a good start to the season to allow momentum we could, of course, sneak into Europe one season or get on a cup run which would speed everything up. We need to establish ourselves as a name that means something, not to the people who already follow the club but to the wider world, commercially and to players from a higher levels.

Let’s not get carried away now and expect the very top players to come to us “cos we are Everton” and we have more money than we used to. We have to continue to strive for improvement, but let’s not set ourselves up for failure. A run of 3/4 defeats on bounce isn’t going to stop us from getting our name into the mix for trophies in 5 years; finishing 9th one season instead of 7th isn’t going to either, nor is signing the odd dud. Sadly, to me, neither is sacking Silva.

I know Man City ruthlessly dispensed with a fair few managers on their rise to the top but no matter who the manager is, we will be the fans, we will be Everton. Let’s not set our managers up to fail, let’s not become parodies like Newcastle fans whose unrealistic expectations make a horrible atmosphere for their own players to play in and a great away for everyone else (never change Geordies).

I am not asking anyone to accept defeats, but let’s not help other teams by showing them our weakness and letting Goodison become one of those grounds that if you get through the first 20, the fans will turn. There are going to be struggles, there are going to be times when the players seem lost and there seems no direction, there are going to be defeats — that is football for the majority. But let’s not underestimate the power of positivity. The managers of the top two know all about the importance of getting the crowd on side and haven’t been shy to criticise their own fans when necessary. It doesn’t just happen that a positive atmosphere happens at teams that are winning every week though. At much lower levels clubs like Stoke have shown the power of getting fans on side when they were successful in peak Tony Pulis era and then what happens when you lose that connection between fans and the side.

I know people talk about the team playing a style of football that gets the fans onside and I’m not suggesting the atmosphere at Goodison is awful by any means, but more than I have ever known the atmosphere through the week is of mini-crisis after mini-crisis and the next game is always “must-win”. Is that attitude going to help us progress as a club and get us to challenging the top 4? Or is it just setting us up for short term failure which will lead to short term remedies and keep pushing the long term success further back?

What as fans can we control? We can control the atmosphere around the club. Yes, in this modern world there’ll always be the Twitter idiots ready to pounce who perversely get off on spreading negativity. Make them the minority. Look for the good things to get behind. Compared to a lot of the last 20 years there’s plenty trust me. Don’t accept that “fans of all teams are like this”. When we lose a game, don’t lose all heart. Keep reminding Moshiri how great this club can be then he might just sanction that next big spending spree quicker that could get us all closer to where we want to be.

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