Daniel Taylor: With Everton, there’s always the feeing that things will be OK next time. Sadly, they rarely are
Take a drive down the old Dock Road in Liverpool, along this route of past glories, decaying warehouses and boarded-up businesses, and it is strange to think how this windswept, often forgotten part of the city is going to change in the next few years.
The Bramley Moore, the pub directly opposite Everton’s proposed new stadium, has a sign on its unpretentious, pebble-dashed walls proclaiming it was established in 1758 and — without wishing to go all Stan Boardman here — there is an easy joke to be had that it might still be using the original carpet.
Most of the dockers’ pubs are long gone, though, on the strip near Bramley Moore Dock. The Imperial, with one of Liverpool’s great pub facades, is now a shell. All that remains of the Sandon Lion is a faded sign in the brickwork. What used to be the local betting shop, BM Racing, is another relic and it is tempting to wonder how long it will be before Frankie & Benny’s, or another of those homogenous chains that tend to pop up beside football’s new-builds, realise how much land there is to swallow up here.
The lorries rattle past and, if you don’t know what you are looking for, you would never realise it is Everton’s future behind that forbidding 12ft-high wall opposite Terry’s Timber.
The idea certainly takes a bit of getting used to. And I doubt I am alone when I say that I will miss the old place. Goodison Park might not have aged as beautifully as it would have liked. It might be cramped, feeling its years and, yes, a bit creaky round the edges. Yet, in another sense, isn’t that part of the charm?
How many other grounds in England’s top division will you find people living directly across the street? Where else can you walk out of the main stand and the nearest pub is ten metres away? The smells! The chip-fat, the beer fumes, the clumps of horse manure that always seem to be decorating Goodison Road on the stretch from the Winslow Hotel to the Dixie Dean statue. It might not be the image Liverpool’s tourist board wants to put on its brochures. Yet, somehow, it just works. There is a soul here, fostered over 100 years, that you cannot hope to recreate by putting up a gleaming new stadium (as impressive as the designs look) on a disused dockyard.
Ultimately, though, everybody should understand the reasons why it has to happen. Everton have to think bigger, in every sense, if they are not to be left further behind. Something has to shake this club into life when we are coming up for a quarter of a century since they last won a trophy and Goodison has been a place of drift for longer than their supporters would probably wish to remember.
Their current position is a reminder of the time Walter Smith came down from Rangers to manage them and, asked what the biggest difference was, pointed out it was no longer necessary to study the higher end of the league table. Everton are 17th, which can also be described as fourth from bottom, just two points clear of the relegation zone. They have stopped mattering to the elite teams, which will wound them more than anything, and they have a hellish run of games coming up, starting with today’s assignment at Leicester, that could conceivably put them in the bottom three before Christmas.
On Wednesday, that involves a derby fixture at Anfield and, inevitably, another airing of the song — “You haven’t won a trophy since 1995” — that Liverpool’s fans reserve for these occasions. Then it is Chelsea’s turn at Goodison and, by that point, who could be surprised if Evertonians are talking about Marco Silva in the past tense?
If anything, it is a surprise Silva has made it to this point bearing in mind the mutinous chants at Everton’s last game, a jarring 2-0 home defeat by Norwich City, that had supporters trying to remember if there had ever been another time when Goodison had turned on a manager so volubly (answer: no).
Nor is it easy to find too much in the way of mitigation for Silva if, as all the evidence suggests, he is unofficially now in football management’s dead-man-walking phase, holding on to his job only because the club have not yet nailed down his replacement.
Silva was brought to Everton to get them into a European spot and, in the process, to create some upwards momentum before the new stadium started going up. He has fallen short on all fronts and Everton have spent far too much money to be left with a team that is straying dangerously close towards the relegation quicksands. Even for those of us who dislike the impatience of the football industry, it is difficult to find any plausible argument why he should be kept on. Far more likely he will leave, like Unai Emery at Arsenal, without any real controversy, quickly to be forgotten.
The problem for Everton is that puts them back in the now familiar grind of hoping that next time it might be different. Always with the modern-day Everton, it seems to be next time.
Roberto Martinez’s first season at Goodison was fun. David Moyes brought plenty of good times and finished in the top four one season. But what are Everton now? Not a “small club”, as Rafael Benitez once said, but a “next time” sort of club. A club who remain in tune with their past, with the statues and wall murals and the wonderful “Everton Giants” tributes beneath Goodison’s blue and white steelwork, but are not so clever when it comes to assembling a team for today. A club who get it wrong far too often while living with the permanent strain — and don’t underestimate how hard this must be — of knowing that the team the opposite side of Stanley Park have a habit of getting it right.
It also probably counts against Silva that he is up against a media darling such as Jurgen Klopp, in the same way, perhaps, that Harry Catterick received barely a fraction of the positive publicity that came Bill Shankly’s way when they were managing the two Merseyside clubs in the 1960s and 1970s.
Shankly, of course, was always so quotable, with his turn of phrase and the sense every time he spoke that it was original (you may remember his line about the two great teams in the city being Liverpool and Liverpool reserves). Catterick, on the other hand, was standoffish, prickly and suspicious with a tendency to see every question as a trap and, like Silva, it could make him a difficult man to embrace.
The difference is that Catterick won two league titles and an FA Cup, whereas the current Everton manager has put out a team that has already lost to the Premier League’s three promoted sides, without managing a single goal. Silva, unlike Catterick, will not be remembered in these parts for a nickname, taken from the Frank Sinatra song, of Mr Success.
It certainly has not been easy to understand Silva’s strategy when it is not always apparent that he is absolutely certain, either. He promised a 4-3-3 system, but has settled on a more conservative 4-2-3-1. His perseverance with Morgan Schneiderlin, in particular, has been baffling. The team, on the whole, have lacked wit and personality and maybe it is also true that Silva’s lack of PR also counts against him. The manager has never shown any real attachment to the club, certainly not in the way that Klopp has bought into Liverpool and everything they stand for.
As one long-time Everton follower told me this week, the supporters know as much about who Silva is, 18 months in, as they did on the day he walked through the door.
Silva might argue that he has not encountered any form of dressing-room mutiny and it would be true that he maintains a good relationship with the players, in particular the Portuguese-speaking ones. But the question is whether he has the precious quality that all the elite managers possess. Can he motivate a team? Does he know how to get the absolute best from his players? And, if he wants us to believe the answer to those questions is yes, when are Premier League audiences going to see the hard evidence?
Add in Silva’s previous work at Watford and Hull City and he has won 41 out of 107 matches in English football, drawn 19 and lost 47. This includes a relegation for Hull and only one occasion, for Everton towards the end of last season, when he has managed a run of three successive wins. There is no point trying to dress it up: his record is moderate and, if these are his final days as Everton manager, they are not the results of a man who will find it easy to be re-employed in England’s top division.
Not that all the blame can be heaped on the manager when Everton’s wastefulness in the transfer market predates his time and, in fairness to the manager, was compounded by some questionable decision-making in the summer (Silva wanted Mario Mandzukic whereas Marcel Brands, Everton’s director of football, preferred Moise Kean).
This is the irony about what Everton have become.
For many years, particularly under Moyes, they were regarded as a sensible and well-run club that were missing only one vital ingredient — real financial might — to sustain a challenge to the sides towards the top of the league.
Everton now have that financial power, courtesy of Farhad Moshiri, the club’s majority shareholder. What they do not seem to have is the same clarity of thought or shrewd judgment.
All that money spent, yet are they really any better off now, football-wise, than they were in the Moyes era?
And what does it say that such a wonderful old football club appears to hold no appeal for a man of Mauricio Pochettino’s choices?
On the Dock Road a security guard in a fluorescent yellow jacket was positioned behind the gates to Bramley Moore Dock when I visited a few days ago and he explained that part of his job was to deal with the number of Everton supporters wanting to explore where their team will be playing, if everything goes to plan, in three and a half years.
Those fans, he explained, had sometimes driven hours to be there and could turn up at all hours.
A small thing, perhaps, but it was a reminder that Everton still have an awful lot in their favour, with a devoted following and ambitious plans, and that, if the club do finally get it right, the new stadium will be a special place. The future is exciting, however difficult it might seem right now. First, though, Everton need to start taking better care of the present and, unfortunately for Silva, it is difficult to see, or justify, him being a part of it.
