In The Flesh?

Fifty thousand, remember that number.

It’s hurtling towards the season started mainly due to being a summer, if you can use hurtling in that context. Summers are seemingly always shorter when there’s one of those international tournaments to give you your methadone to the heroin of Everton, speaking in a strictly North Wirral analogy.

So ya thought you may like to go to the show?

What have we got so far? Lashings of big Ronny Koe and the formation of the next Everton team under our latest manager. It seems to be more emphasis on moving the ball quicker and pressure on the opposition, two components that Evertonians particularly enjoy in their teams. Deulofeu playing up front and terroring lower league players warms the heart like making it home from town in time for the ten minute freeview in 1995.

Obviously it’s hard to base any sort of predictions off just two pre seasons games so we’ll draw little conclusions, lest we turn into an over enthusiastic kopite anticipating a nailed on twenty seventh league consecutive league title.

Tom Davies though, he’s gonna play some togger for Everton isn’t he?

What is apparent is that there’s gaps to be plugged in a generally accepted unbalanced squad. It’s also a given with a new manager will want players to fit into his system and also generate enough change to create his own culture, for playing methods, effort, behaviour and standards.

To achieve this there’ll need to be the buying and selling of our own players. They call it the Transfer Window and it’s been hyped to almost deity type status so it even gets capital letters to signify its importance.

Except is it?

The transfer window unleashes the higher collective display of Everton anxiety than the [Poor language removed] being awarded a free kick around Everton’s penalty area in the final minutes of a derby where we are not yet losing. To be honest the transfer window brings out the worst and most scruffy needy Geordie behaviour amongst football fans with more than a few hooked on it. To feel that warm thrill of confusion, that space cadet glow.

You can surmise that it’s origins are in a generation who have been brought up on football manager simulation games and think that the transfer window is the only path to success. Each their own but statistically speaking they’re also more likely to hanging around a Pokemon Go gym and wear Boston ball stranglers instead of boxies. Their entire self confidence is based on Everton signing what they consider to be ace players, they’ll often call them “ballers”. You know these types.

Every day is an obsession over who we may or may not sign and what agent is saying what, along with a whole variety of jarg twitter accounts being translated and a whole bunch of in the knows bidding on certain players and timescales.

Really what does it matter if you know a day or two before someone signs for Everton? Would it make a big difference? Or do you want to complete one of them cringey little formations with over emphasis of where you’d play said new player. Not sure why I’m addressing anyone relating to this in first person here. Remember when we signed Eto’o and then played him on the left and he binned us off after four months?

GrandOldTeam itself has both an app and a WhatsApp service that will buzz your phone with relevant news once someone signs. Take advantage.

In the meantime it’s a media driven shitstorm which has evolved into a race for gullible texans to click pages and links and generate advertising money. To take it one step further I got bad news for you sunshine; that Murdoch-though-lar started the whole transfer rumour meltfest in the late sixties to fill column inches in first editions until the later editions could contain the match report. And he’s right inside your head jumping up while eagerly placing various love eggs in Jerry Hall’s generously spaced foof.

Making Everton truly competitive around the top of the table again is going to take some time. It’s seldom that such grandiose plans are rushed through to achievement.

True that we have a Champions League team visiting Goodison in just over two weeks from now for the first game and y’all want to be ready but from what it seems football and it’s transfers are complicated processes these days, especially if you’re after specific players to come in and improve the team and just not improve the squad.

It could all go to shit even, it’s happened before. Something seems a little different this time but maybe that’s just misplaced optimism and Moshiri is the afterbirth of Peter Johnson sent to finally cull Everton once and for all.

There’s few ITKs that can predict that, nor I’d guess anyone around adept at reading tea leaves to give us a heads up. Everything happens in good time.

So take some time.

While we’re at it Martin Stekelenburg has a slight turn-eye which must make it a nightmare for the gaze of anyone interviewing him post match, the attempts to focus on the bridge of the nose is unconvincing, and they know you’re doing it.

Everton – against an ITK backdrop of low season ticket sales – went and produced figures of 32,000 of you laying a claim to all league games this season. Mad numbers them. It highlights the need for a stadium with a higher capacity, which incidentally seems to be making more progress than the various embarrassments we’ve had in the past sixteen years or so. Got to be on the river though. With a massive blue liver bird on the side of it, with pure snide liver bird eyes that for night time games emit a blue laser beam across the river that liberates the good people of Wallasey by burning out the all the bagheads. They celebrated John Aldridge as manager never forget.

Everton released an away kit which split some of you, apparently Pink isn’t well. You know where you are with Umbro kits and Everton, that not many wear them above the age of fifteen.

England shit it in the Euros – quelle surprise – but thankfully Everton’s players in the squad didn’t get burned, Barkley was down the list beyond Lallana, Sterling and others. And John Stones? He stayed back at the hotel. Their small town wannabe heroes took an awful beasting from Mother Russia and then to resolve the “fifty years of hurt” on the field they went and gave Sam Allardyce the job as manager. Hmmmm.

Oh and Southampton were dead confident we wouldn’t take their manager, like they were playing Wembley and they sent us along as a surrogate band. But we took their lead singer. Back in your box.

Brexit is the word of the summer but no one really knows how it will turn out but are hoping that all them dead clever economists are wrong, every single one of them, and that Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are right. And they wonder why there’s a tad of disassociation with Merseysiders and England. Not on the Wirral though. Have you been over there when England are playing in tournaments? England flags hanging from houses all over the show. Which for a few may cause consternation on potentially signing a Muslim called Gueye, with the letters i,s,i and s in his first name. Maybe his tackles can melt steel beams?

Lots of cheap unnecessary shots at the peninsula but it’s a regret of mine that I’ll probably never get to preview Tranmere Rovers on a regular basis so this is a good a time as any. Obviously if you’re a blue over that side then this cheap goading and isn’t applicable to you, and I’d like to apologise. Batches though? Barm cakes.

Anyway fifty thousand.

By the time you’re reading this there’s over fifty thousand minutes left before the Transfer Window closes for the summer of 2016. Relax a little man. Or girl.

We’re gonna find out where you folks really stand.

In the absence of the Stephen Hughes Bellefield tree it’s the blue, blue tiles of Finch Farm that confirm when we signed a new player. Wait until then, when you see them, in the flesh.