Tez
Player Valuation: £8m
Given that we ended up missing out on several targets and ended the window without all the players we needed - straight from the manager and owner - surely they weren't bed wetters in hindsight?
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Steve Walsh - no longer our Director of Football
- Thread starter GrandOldTeam
- Start date
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Given that we ended up missing out on several targets and ended the window without all the players we needed - straight from the manager and owner - surely they weren't bed wetters in hindsight?
ianefc
Player Valuation: £70m
Excuses for what? The first team being improved in 4 positions, despite a pre-season of transition?
The bed wetters won the battle. The excuse makers last hope of " Deals will be done on the last day, let's relax " was overwhelmed and overrun when it was announced we signed Enner Valencia.
ianefc
Player Valuation: £70m
Yes they were and are because this isn't FIFA and it is t a case of pressing X. Analyse each transfer we missed out on, that'd be fair, ignore tempting phantom bid brigade, they want us to fail, they crave it.
We had plenty of excuses.
Euro's are on, when it's finished the signings will happen.
Euro's finished, the players will sign when they come back off holiday.
I kid you not but someone suggested the Nice terror attack as a reason we wouldn't sign a player that weekend.
The Pogba transfer will start the domino.
Excuse after excuse, it was superb. But, they got defeated by the bed wetters.
ianefc
Player Valuation: £70m
I don't think it's as clear cut as Bed Wetters v Excuse makers. I just think that I'm being patient at the moment, I've said I was dissapointed that no new striker was brought in, but I've just put up with nearly 2 decades of Kenwright, I can put up with 1 or 2 windows of Moshiri before losing my rag, especially one where he didn't get his manager unto July and DOF until even later. Make no mistake they were left with a massive job after Roberto Martinez.
ianefc
Player Valuation: £70m
I strongly disagree.
Steve Walsh, Everton’s Director of Football, can remember vividly the first time he encountered David Unsworth: “He’s from my neck of the woods, so I knew David as a schoolboy. He’s always been the way he is now – big, strong, powerful and a really good lad.”
Steve has trodden a remarkable path to his latest role at Goodison Park. It began decades ago in the heartland of Lancashire. A Physical Education teacher at Bishop Rawstorne High School, he would combine his full-time day job with that of coaching the county Under-15s and North-West Under-16s sides.
“The school was in Croston, which is a village between Chorley and Southport,” he recalls. “It’s a beautiful village, Bishop Rawstorne is a lovely school and I enjoyed my time there. If you are in teaching, you have got to be organised and be a good manager. You can certainly take those skills and adapt them to football.
“If you think a lot about the game, you start to do some coaching. I’ve always been somebody who picks and puts together teams. I was finding the best players to represent the county at that level.
“David played in that county team. I have known him since he was 14 or 15. He was always destined to have a career as a footballer. Ipswich were keen on him at one point. They had taken a player called Mark Brennan from the Blackburn area a few years earlier and he was a very similar type of player to David. Obviously, David chose Everton and the rest is history really. I saw him play against Japan [in 1995]. It was his only England cap – but I was there! I saw him make his debut for his country and I bet I was as proud as he was.”
As you can quickly gather, Steve has an encyclopaedic knowledge of football, gathered from attending thousands of matches and studying just as many players. Years and years of experience have earned him the tag as a ‘scouting genius’, the man who pieced together Leicester City’s phenomenal Premier League success last season.
He worked part-time at Chester City and Bury, in addition to his teaching career. Days in the classroom and sports hall would be followed by evenings and weekends in the stands at lower league grounds, identifying footballers with talent and potential.
His eye for a player meant that he advanced to become the man tasked with talent-spotting across Europe for Chelsea and he is often credited with fulfilling a key role in the recruitment of Gianfranco Zola and Didier Drogba.
“A lot of games, a lot of flights,” he smiles. “But the more you get involved in it, the more you want to do a good job and that means making your knowledge as good as it can be. You can only make valued judgements on players when you’ve got knowledge. Whether you get that from players who work with you, reports and DVD evidence, or using your own experience when you go to watch players live.
“Sometimes you watch a player once and you know he is going to be the player for you. Sometimes you’ve got your doubts and go back three or four times. It’s an unknown quantity really. It can be once or twice, or a dozen times. And sometimes you might even change your mind on a player. You might think he isn’t as good as you thought – or it could be the other way round. You might see a player and think, ‘No, not really,’ then you see him on another day, playing away or at home, depending on where you had seen him before. It can vary – it’s not an exact science.
“At Chelsea, I was just part of the process. A guy called Gwyn Williams came along and offered me a part-time role, which I obviously fulfilled. The role grew in the organisation and I worked under a lot of different managers. Gwyn was always the person who stayed, even though the managers always went through the revolving doors. Eventually, I became full-time.
“At that time I was more of an information-gatherer rather than someone who made that decision. But was I part and parcel of that process? Yes I was.
“In those days we were looking at Zola but he was already an Italian international. You still had to make a call. I went to watch Didier Drogba at Marseille and I had seen him before when he was at Guingamp in the lower leagues. I was asked, ‘What do you think of him?’ But it was someone else’s call. It was only when I left Chelsea and became chief scout at Newcastle that it became my responsibility to make the calls. It’s difficult the first time you do it because you are spending an awful lot of somebody’s money and there is the big expectation that fans have.”
As Steve explains, after 16 years at Stamford Bridge, he joined Newcastle United in 2006, taking up the position of chief scout under Sam Allardyce. He later became assistant manager and head of recruitment at Leicester City, then Hull City alongside Nigel Pearson, returning to the King Power Stadium in 2011.
Although Pearson left his position in July 2015, Walsh’s services were retained, so vital was his role considered to be by the Foxes’ hierarchy. In fact, no single person at City may have played a more key role when the Foxes defied the 5000/1 odds at the beginning of the season to become champions of England.
Three players, in particular, shone brightly in Leicester’s title-winning campaign but their success wasn’t only about Riyad Mahrez, Jamie Vardy and N’Golo Kante.
“When I picked up Mahrez it was on the back of me going to watch Ryan Mendes, who was at Nottingham Forest on loan last year,” Walsh relates. “I didn’t rate him as highly – he certainly wasn’t the player we needed at that time. But I saw Mahrez and thought, ‘Wow, he’s not bad, this kid has got something.’
“He did those tricks where he shows defenders the ball and then takes it away from them. Obviously, everyone had seen him but no-one had taken a chance. I thought this kid could do things with the ball even though he wasn’t the biggest– he’s got thin legs and doesn’t do any weights! I went back and met the boy, I kind of bonded with him after that and he wanted to come to Leicester. My Lancashire accent transcends!
“I did pretty much the same with Kante as well. Jamie Vardy was a little bit different. I’d left Leicester and gone up to Hull. I remember going across to watch him – that was a long way, Hull to Fleetwood. It was on a Friday night before we’d played on the Saturday. I made a call on him [later at Leicester] and to this day he’s the first £1m non-league player. Was it a big call? It was a massive call! We were paying £1m for someone from non-league football. Yet, Leicester could have got about £22m this summer if he’d decided to go. And he’s playing for England, too.
“People also forget I bought Danny Simpson from QPR. Wes Morgan was my first signing and I paid a million for him from Forest. I brought in Robert Huth the season before last and he kept us up. Eventually, we had to pay £4m for him but it was good value in the end. I got Christian Fuchs on a free from Schalke – he had played in the Champions League and against Real Madrid in the Bernabeu.
“I took Marc Albrighton on a free from Aston Villa because he’d reached the end of the road there. I bought Danny Drinkwater for £750,000, again from Manchester United. I got Shinji Okazaki for £7m from Mainz in the Bundesliga and Leonardo Ulloa I took from Brighton for £8m – people thought I was stupid at the time.
“If you package all that up, the starting XI for 75 per cent of the games last year, I brought them all in apart from Schmeichel, who Sven [Goran Eriksson] had signed earlier. He’d improved as a goalkeeper and I put that down to Mike Stowell, the ex-Everton player, who’s an excellent goalkeeping coach and did wonders with him.”
It was the lure of the “exciting new era” at Everton and his connections to the Club – his brother, Mickey, starred 26 times for the Blues in the late 1970s – that proved too much for Steve to turn down when he was approached about making the switch to Merseyside. But what exactly is his remit at Finch Farm and Goodison Park? The job description of a Director of Football varies at different clubs.
“It’s a bit unknown to Everton because it’s a new role for the Club,” he reasons. “How I see it is to get involved first of all with first-team recruitment and make sure that area is good. Once I get an opportunity, we will look at what’s further down with the Under-23s and the Academy.
“Because most of my expertise is in recruitment, that’s taken up all my time. I’ve got to get that right and make sure we have got a squad that is fit and capable to go forward. Obviously, I’m here for the long haul, I’m here to lay foundations but my initial business is actually making sure we’ve got the right people in place.
“We will set systems and structures in place to make sure we get the best talent and manage that talent so the coaches are able to work their magic and take things forward. All the other matters with the football side of things, I’m going to be involved in. Obviously, I’ve got my relationship with the manager first of all and the coaching staff as well. And the players – you have got to get a relationship with them, too. So it’s going to be across the board. I intend to immerse myself gradually.
“I’m getting to know Ronald [Koeman]. He’s very driven, he’s very positive and he has high standards. He’s been a great player and understands what he wants. He knows systems and structures of play and knows how to get the best out of players. It’s forming that relationship and getting into his way of thinking in terms of what he wants in a player. It’s got to be a joint venture – there’s no point in me bringing players to him and then he’s not going to play them. I’ve got to make sure we are on common ground. And so far, so good.”
Walsh’s first significant contribution at Everton was to identify and recommend the signature of Idrissa Gana Gueye, who sealed his move from Aston Villa on 2 August.
“I told the manager to have a look at this lad because I think he can do all the things we want him to do,” he says. “We earmarked the fact that we were looking for a bit more energy from that part of the field. He moves the ball quickly and runs with the ball. He is good at pressing and good at intercepting.
“Don’t put too much on his shoulders but he is a little bit like Kante. You’ll see that when he presses. He just needs now to show a little bit more discipline and he’ll be a really good player for us, we believe.”
Steve was speaking to Everton Magazine from his office at Finch Farm, just hours after the Gueye deal was announced. He was already in the midst of plotting his next transfer but kindly gave up half an hour of his time for the interview. His mobile phone, perched on the desk in front of him, has rung on a couple of occasions but he has declined to answer, instead keeping his attention on the conversation.
“I don’t think you can switch off,” he confesses with a wry smile. “It’s hard, it really is. You become obsessed by it. You don’t sleep well sometimes, particularly when the transfer window is open.
“Once the window closes, it’s information-gathering time again. You are out and about. I’ll be at all our games but I have to go where my job dictates. If I have to miss a game because we have got to make a crucial move on a player, I’ll do that. Otherwise, I’d like to be at our games, getting a feel for how we play. I want to hopefully be part of some success here. It’s a fantastic football club and that’s the reason I came.”
Noticed a longer version of his interview on the OS.
Steve has trodden a remarkable path to his latest role at Goodison Park. It began decades ago in the heartland of Lancashire. A Physical Education teacher at Bishop Rawstorne High School, he would combine his full-time day job with that of coaching the county Under-15s and North-West Under-16s sides.
“The school was in Croston, which is a village between Chorley and Southport,” he recalls. “It’s a beautiful village, Bishop Rawstorne is a lovely school and I enjoyed my time there. If you are in teaching, you have got to be organised and be a good manager. You can certainly take those skills and adapt them to football.
“If you think a lot about the game, you start to do some coaching. I’ve always been somebody who picks and puts together teams. I was finding the best players to represent the county at that level.
“David played in that county team. I have known him since he was 14 or 15. He was always destined to have a career as a footballer. Ipswich were keen on him at one point. They had taken a player called Mark Brennan from the Blackburn area a few years earlier and he was a very similar type of player to David. Obviously, David chose Everton and the rest is history really. I saw him play against Japan [in 1995]. It was his only England cap – but I was there! I saw him make his debut for his country and I bet I was as proud as he was.”
As you can quickly gather, Steve has an encyclopaedic knowledge of football, gathered from attending thousands of matches and studying just as many players. Years and years of experience have earned him the tag as a ‘scouting genius’, the man who pieced together Leicester City’s phenomenal Premier League success last season.
He worked part-time at Chester City and Bury, in addition to his teaching career. Days in the classroom and sports hall would be followed by evenings and weekends in the stands at lower league grounds, identifying footballers with talent and potential.
His eye for a player meant that he advanced to become the man tasked with talent-spotting across Europe for Chelsea and he is often credited with fulfilling a key role in the recruitment of Gianfranco Zola and Didier Drogba.
“A lot of games, a lot of flights,” he smiles. “But the more you get involved in it, the more you want to do a good job and that means making your knowledge as good as it can be. You can only make valued judgements on players when you’ve got knowledge. Whether you get that from players who work with you, reports and DVD evidence, or using your own experience when you go to watch players live.
“Sometimes you watch a player once and you know he is going to be the player for you. Sometimes you’ve got your doubts and go back three or four times. It’s an unknown quantity really. It can be once or twice, or a dozen times. And sometimes you might even change your mind on a player. You might think he isn’t as good as you thought – or it could be the other way round. You might see a player and think, ‘No, not really,’ then you see him on another day, playing away or at home, depending on where you had seen him before. It can vary – it’s not an exact science.
“At Chelsea, I was just part of the process. A guy called Gwyn Williams came along and offered me a part-time role, which I obviously fulfilled. The role grew in the organisation and I worked under a lot of different managers. Gwyn was always the person who stayed, even though the managers always went through the revolving doors. Eventually, I became full-time.
“At that time I was more of an information-gatherer rather than someone who made that decision. But was I part and parcel of that process? Yes I was.
“In those days we were looking at Zola but he was already an Italian international. You still had to make a call. I went to watch Didier Drogba at Marseille and I had seen him before when he was at Guingamp in the lower leagues. I was asked, ‘What do you think of him?’ But it was someone else’s call. It was only when I left Chelsea and became chief scout at Newcastle that it became my responsibility to make the calls. It’s difficult the first time you do it because you are spending an awful lot of somebody’s money and there is the big expectation that fans have.”
As Steve explains, after 16 years at Stamford Bridge, he joined Newcastle United in 2006, taking up the position of chief scout under Sam Allardyce. He later became assistant manager and head of recruitment at Leicester City, then Hull City alongside Nigel Pearson, returning to the King Power Stadium in 2011.
Although Pearson left his position in July 2015, Walsh’s services were retained, so vital was his role considered to be by the Foxes’ hierarchy. In fact, no single person at City may have played a more key role when the Foxes defied the 5000/1 odds at the beginning of the season to become champions of England.
Three players, in particular, shone brightly in Leicester’s title-winning campaign but their success wasn’t only about Riyad Mahrez, Jamie Vardy and N’Golo Kante.
“When I picked up Mahrez it was on the back of me going to watch Ryan Mendes, who was at Nottingham Forest on loan last year,” Walsh relates. “I didn’t rate him as highly – he certainly wasn’t the player we needed at that time. But I saw Mahrez and thought, ‘Wow, he’s not bad, this kid has got something.’
“He did those tricks where he shows defenders the ball and then takes it away from them. Obviously, everyone had seen him but no-one had taken a chance. I thought this kid could do things with the ball even though he wasn’t the biggest– he’s got thin legs and doesn’t do any weights! I went back and met the boy, I kind of bonded with him after that and he wanted to come to Leicester. My Lancashire accent transcends!
“I did pretty much the same with Kante as well. Jamie Vardy was a little bit different. I’d left Leicester and gone up to Hull. I remember going across to watch him – that was a long way, Hull to Fleetwood. It was on a Friday night before we’d played on the Saturday. I made a call on him [later at Leicester] and to this day he’s the first £1m non-league player. Was it a big call? It was a massive call! We were paying £1m for someone from non-league football. Yet, Leicester could have got about £22m this summer if he’d decided to go. And he’s playing for England, too.
“People also forget I bought Danny Simpson from QPR. Wes Morgan was my first signing and I paid a million for him from Forest. I brought in Robert Huth the season before last and he kept us up. Eventually, we had to pay £4m for him but it was good value in the end. I got Christian Fuchs on a free from Schalke – he had played in the Champions League and against Real Madrid in the Bernabeu.
“I took Marc Albrighton on a free from Aston Villa because he’d reached the end of the road there. I bought Danny Drinkwater for £750,000, again from Manchester United. I got Shinji Okazaki for £7m from Mainz in the Bundesliga and Leonardo Ulloa I took from Brighton for £8m – people thought I was stupid at the time.
“If you package all that up, the starting XI for 75 per cent of the games last year, I brought them all in apart from Schmeichel, who Sven [Goran Eriksson] had signed earlier. He’d improved as a goalkeeper and I put that down to Mike Stowell, the ex-Everton player, who’s an excellent goalkeeping coach and did wonders with him.”
It was the lure of the “exciting new era” at Everton and his connections to the Club – his brother, Mickey, starred 26 times for the Blues in the late 1970s – that proved too much for Steve to turn down when he was approached about making the switch to Merseyside. But what exactly is his remit at Finch Farm and Goodison Park? The job description of a Director of Football varies at different clubs.
“It’s a bit unknown to Everton because it’s a new role for the Club,” he reasons. “How I see it is to get involved first of all with first-team recruitment and make sure that area is good. Once I get an opportunity, we will look at what’s further down with the Under-23s and the Academy.
“Because most of my expertise is in recruitment, that’s taken up all my time. I’ve got to get that right and make sure we have got a squad that is fit and capable to go forward. Obviously, I’m here for the long haul, I’m here to lay foundations but my initial business is actually making sure we’ve got the right people in place.
“We will set systems and structures in place to make sure we get the best talent and manage that talent so the coaches are able to work their magic and take things forward. All the other matters with the football side of things, I’m going to be involved in. Obviously, I’ve got my relationship with the manager first of all and the coaching staff as well. And the players – you have got to get a relationship with them, too. So it’s going to be across the board. I intend to immerse myself gradually.
“I’m getting to know Ronald [Koeman]. He’s very driven, he’s very positive and he has high standards. He’s been a great player and understands what he wants. He knows systems and structures of play and knows how to get the best out of players. It’s forming that relationship and getting into his way of thinking in terms of what he wants in a player. It’s got to be a joint venture – there’s no point in me bringing players to him and then he’s not going to play them. I’ve got to make sure we are on common ground. And so far, so good.”
Walsh’s first significant contribution at Everton was to identify and recommend the signature of Idrissa Gana Gueye, who sealed his move from Aston Villa on 2 August.
“I told the manager to have a look at this lad because I think he can do all the things we want him to do,” he says. “We earmarked the fact that we were looking for a bit more energy from that part of the field. He moves the ball quickly and runs with the ball. He is good at pressing and good at intercepting.
“Don’t put too much on his shoulders but he is a little bit like Kante. You’ll see that when he presses. He just needs now to show a little bit more discipline and he’ll be a really good player for us, we believe.”
Steve was speaking to Everton Magazine from his office at Finch Farm, just hours after the Gueye deal was announced. He was already in the midst of plotting his next transfer but kindly gave up half an hour of his time for the interview. His mobile phone, perched on the desk in front of him, has rung on a couple of occasions but he has declined to answer, instead keeping his attention on the conversation.
“I don’t think you can switch off,” he confesses with a wry smile. “It’s hard, it really is. You become obsessed by it. You don’t sleep well sometimes, particularly when the transfer window is open.
“Once the window closes, it’s information-gathering time again. You are out and about. I’ll be at all our games but I have to go where my job dictates. If I have to miss a game because we have got to make a crucial move on a player, I’ll do that. Otherwise, I’d like to be at our games, getting a feel for how we play. I want to hopefully be part of some success here. It’s a fantastic football club and that’s the reason I came.”
Noticed a longer version of his interview on the OS.
It took a year for bobby's "training " to kick in mate... we passed more i agree... but it took him a whole season to drive fitness levels of professional footballers to that of a 40 a day smoker. Just like it will take RK at least 4 windows to be able to truely call the squad "his players" and will take at least 6 months for players to get to grips with his system
D
Deleted member 28206
Guest
LONGER????Steve Walsh, Everton’s Director of Football, can remember vividly the first time he encountered David Unsworth: “He’s from my neck of the woods, so I knew David as a schoolboy. He’s always been the way he is now – big, strong, powerful and a really good lad.”
Steve has trodden a remarkable path to his latest role at Goodison Park. It began decades ago in the heartland of Lancashire. A Physical Education teacher at Bishop Rawstorne High School, he would combine his full-time day job with that of coaching the county Under-15s and North-West Under-16s sides.
“The school was in Croston, which is a village between Chorley and Southport,” he recalls. “It’s a beautiful village, Bishop Rawstorne is a lovely school and I enjoyed my time there. If you are in teaching, you have got to be organised and be a good manager. You can certainly take those skills and adapt them to football.
“If you think a lot about the game, you start to do some coaching. I’ve always been somebody who picks and puts together teams. I was finding the best players to represent the county at that level.
“David played in that county team. I have known him since he was 14 or 15. He was always destined to have a career as a footballer. Ipswich were keen on him at one point. They had taken a player called Mark Brennan from the Blackburn area a few years earlier and he was a very similar type of player to David. Obviously, David chose Everton and the rest is history really. I saw him play against Japan [in 1995]. It was his only England cap – but I was there! I saw him make his debut for his country and I bet I was as proud as he was.”
As you can quickly gather, Steve has an encyclopaedic knowledge of football, gathered from attending thousands of matches and studying just as many players. Years and years of experience have earned him the tag as a ‘scouting genius’, the man who pieced together Leicester City’s phenomenal Premier League success last season.
He worked part-time at Chester City and Bury, in addition to his teaching career. Days in the classroom and sports hall would be followed by evenings and weekends in the stands at lower league grounds, identifying footballers with talent and potential.
His eye for a player meant that he advanced to become the man tasked with talent-spotting across Europe for Chelsea and he is often credited with fulfilling a key role in the recruitment of Gianfranco Zola and Didier Drogba.
“A lot of games, a lot of flights,” he smiles. “But the more you get involved in it, the more you want to do a good job and that means making your knowledge as good as it can be. You can only make valued judgements on players when you’ve got knowledge. Whether you get that from players who work with you, reports and DVD evidence, or using your own experience when you go to watch players live.
“Sometimes you watch a player once and you know he is going to be the player for you. Sometimes you’ve got your doubts and go back three or four times. It’s an unknown quantity really. It can be once or twice, or a dozen times. And sometimes you might even change your mind on a player. You might think he isn’t as good as you thought – or it could be the other way round. You might see a player and think, ‘No, not really,’ then you see him on another day, playing away or at home, depending on where you had seen him before. It can vary – it’s not an exact science.
“At Chelsea, I was just part of the process. A guy called Gwyn Williams came along and offered me a part-time role, which I obviously fulfilled. The role grew in the organisation and I worked under a lot of different managers. Gwyn was always the person who stayed, even though the managers always went through the revolving doors. Eventually, I became full-time.
“At that time I was more of an information-gatherer rather than someone who made that decision. But was I part and parcel of that process? Yes I was.
“In those days we were looking at Zola but he was already an Italian international. You still had to make a call. I went to watch Didier Drogba at Marseille and I had seen him before when he was at Guingamp in the lower leagues. I was asked, ‘What do you think of him?’ But it was someone else’s call. It was only when I left Chelsea and became chief scout at Newcastle that it became my responsibility to make the calls. It’s difficult the first time you do it because you are spending an awful lot of somebody’s money and there is the big expectation that fans have.”
As Steve explains, after 16 years at Stamford Bridge, he joined Newcastle United in 2006, taking up the position of chief scout under Sam Allardyce. He later became assistant manager and head of recruitment at Leicester City, then Hull City alongside Nigel Pearson, returning to the King Power Stadium in 2011.
Although Pearson left his position in July 2015, Walsh’s services were retained, so vital was his role considered to be by the Foxes’ hierarchy. In fact, no single person at City may have played a more key role when the Foxes defied the 5000/1 odds at the beginning of the season to become champions of England.
Three players, in particular, shone brightly in Leicester’s title-winning campaign but their success wasn’t only about Riyad Mahrez, Jamie Vardy and N’Golo Kante.
“When I picked up Mahrez it was on the back of me going to watch Ryan Mendes, who was at Nottingham Forest on loan last year,” Walsh relates. “I didn’t rate him as highly – he certainly wasn’t the player we needed at that time. But I saw Mahrez and thought, ‘Wow, he’s not bad, this kid has got something.’
“He did those tricks where he shows defenders the ball and then takes it away from them. Obviously, everyone had seen him but no-one had taken a chance. I thought this kid could do things with the ball even though he wasn’t the biggest– he’s got thin legs and doesn’t do any weights! I went back and met the boy, I kind of bonded with him after that and he wanted to come to Leicester. My Lancashire accent transcends!
“I did pretty much the same with Kante as well. Jamie Vardy was a little bit different. I’d left Leicester and gone up to Hull. I remember going across to watch him – that was a long way, Hull to Fleetwood. It was on a Friday night before we’d played on the Saturday. I made a call on him [later at Leicester] and to this day he’s the first £1m non-league player. Was it a big call? It was a massive call! We were paying £1m for someone from non-league football. Yet, Leicester could have got about £22m this summer if he’d decided to go. And he’s playing for England, too.
“People also forget I bought Danny Simpson from QPR. Wes Morgan was my first signing and I paid a million for him from Forest. I brought in Robert Huth the season before last and he kept us up. Eventually, we had to pay £4m for him but it was good value in the end. I got Christian Fuchs on a free from Schalke – he had played in the Champions League and against Real Madrid in the Bernabeu.
“I took Marc Albrighton on a free from Aston Villa because he’d reached the end of the road there. I bought Danny Drinkwater for £750,000, again from Manchester United. I got Shinji Okazaki for £7m from Mainz in the Bundesliga and Leonardo Ulloa I took from Brighton for £8m – people thought I was stupid at the time.
“If you package all that up, the starting XI for 75 per cent of the games last year, I brought them all in apart from Schmeichel, who Sven [Goran Eriksson] had signed earlier. He’d improved as a goalkeeper and I put that down to Mike Stowell, the ex-Everton player, who’s an excellent goalkeeping coach and did wonders with him.”
It was the lure of the “exciting new era” at Everton and his connections to the Club – his brother, Mickey, starred 26 times for the Blues in the late 1970s – that proved too much for Steve to turn down when he was approached about making the switch to Merseyside. But what exactly is his remit at Finch Farm and Goodison Park? The job description of a Director of Football varies at different clubs.
“It’s a bit unknown to Everton because it’s a new role for the Club,” he reasons. “How I see it is to get involved first of all with first-team recruitment and make sure that area is good. Once I get an opportunity, we will look at what’s further down with the Under-23s and the Academy.
“Because most of my expertise is in recruitment, that’s taken up all my time. I’ve got to get that right and make sure we have got a squad that is fit and capable to go forward. Obviously, I’m here for the long haul, I’m here to lay foundations but my initial business is actually making sure we’ve got the right people in place.
“We will set systems and structures in place to make sure we get the best talent and manage that talent so the coaches are able to work their magic and take things forward. All the other matters with the football side of things, I’m going to be involved in. Obviously, I’ve got my relationship with the manager first of all and the coaching staff as well. And the players – you have got to get a relationship with them, too. So it’s going to be across the board. I intend to immerse myself gradually.
“I’m getting to know Ronald [Koeman]. He’s very driven, he’s very positive and he has high standards. He’s been a great player and understands what he wants. He knows systems and structures of play and knows how to get the best out of players. It’s forming that relationship and getting into his way of thinking in terms of what he wants in a player. It’s got to be a joint venture – there’s no point in me bringing players to him and then he’s not going to play them. I’ve got to make sure we are on common ground. And so far, so good.”
Walsh’s first significant contribution at Everton was to identify and recommend the signature of Idrissa Gana Gueye, who sealed his move from Aston Villa on 2 August.
“I told the manager to have a look at this lad because I think he can do all the things we want him to do,” he says. “We earmarked the fact that we were looking for a bit more energy from that part of the field. He moves the ball quickly and runs with the ball. He is good at pressing and good at intercepting.
“Don’t put too much on his shoulders but he is a little bit like Kante. You’ll see that when he presses. He just needs now to show a little bit more discipline and he’ll be a really good player for us, we believe.”
Steve was speaking to Everton Magazine from his office at Finch Farm, just hours after the Gueye deal was announced. He was already in the midst of plotting his next transfer but kindly gave up half an hour of his time for the interview. His mobile phone, perched on the desk in front of him, has rung on a couple of occasions but he has declined to answer, instead keeping his attention on the conversation.
“I don’t think you can switch off,” he confesses with a wry smile. “It’s hard, it really is. You become obsessed by it. You don’t sleep well sometimes, particularly when the transfer window is open.
“Once the window closes, it’s information-gathering time again. You are out and about. I’ll be at all our games but I have to go where my job dictates. If I have to miss a game because we have got to make a crucial move on a player, I’ll do that. Otherwise, I’d like to be at our games, getting a feel for how we play. I want to hopefully be part of some success here. It’s a fantastic football club and that’s the reason I came.”
Noticed a longer version of his interview on the OS.
It's like an X factor sob story that
Jags..class
Player Valuation: £70m
So Gueye is Walsh first signing. Great start tbf
Zatara
Player Valuation: £100m
Holgate got motm against Stoke and was improving game on game. What kind of message does it send out to then drop him?
Deulofeu has been played out of position and then sees Mirallas and Bolasie ahead of him. We have seen 1st hand that when he gets a run of games he and Rom are a lethal combination.
Cleverley then gets in the side which was a major stick to beat martinez with. In all of the games he has started, we have won about 5. He was played against a team who went with 2 wingers, why didnt we go with 2 and instead cede the front foot against them?
Bolasie to me looks like a clown but hes being shifted from right to left during games...fair enough if its to confuse the opposition but 8/9 attacks are direct long passes to him or Lukaku.
Barkley is getting stick but needs ball to feet in games. The only player who is giving him ball to feet is Gueye.
We have posters like yourself (no offence) who are saying that weve had our best start for XXX years...and thats a fact. However, we needed to get those points on the board against teams like Sunderland, Boro and Stoke who were on poor runs and likewise we needed to get wins against Bournemouth and Palace.
We didnt perform against either Bournemouth,Palace or indeed Norwich in the cup. If we had lost against Palace (with their disallowed goal etc) we would be going into Man City on the back of three straight defeats which, on paper were against weaker sides where we set up negatively.
We are now in a false position (on paper) and when we play the better teams we will see where we really stand in the league and so far it would seem that we are just above the relegation threatened sides rather than top 6.
Zatara
Player Valuation: £100m
This time we have:
Me:Thinks Koemans had an average at best managerial career with some major disasters. Cant stand the long ball nor dropping Deulofeu and Holgate.
Ian: Thinks Koeman is the re-incarnation of Christ and sees long balls as total football...hated Martinez since he joined and saw him as the antichrist.
Dave: Who knows...
Bizarro: Somewhere mimicking Dave
Bluetoff: Rainbows and fairys...
Holgate played well - and looks like he could be a very good player. Regardless, our returning first-choice right-back (one of the best in the league) was back from injury, which means the need for a 19-year-old CB to play there wasn't as pressing...
To get a run of games you have to perform. I'm sure if we had an alternative to Barkley then Ross may also have found himself out of the team for a match or two.
I never beat Martinez with the Cleverley stick personally. We can do better and there's no way he should be starting every game, but with the injuries we had and the fact that he came on vs Bournemouth and added something to a poor display meant he had every right to start. Koeman clearly said it was to make us more compact (he said this in the pre-match interview).
Bolasie has been our best attacking player (behind Lukaku) this season. He's created very good chances every game he's played, despite his inconsistencies, totally making the 'no end product' argument invalid. He doesn't set the price tag and I think he's playing how most of us would have expected him to - he offers us something different to what we had before as well.
I agree with that on Barkley, but it is the fans who are giving him stick - even the media have laid off since Koeman himself has defended Barkley several times. That being said, Ross's form in the last few games hasn't been up to his usual standard and he needs to step up.
Well we aren't really in a false position at all. We've had more than enough chances to win games, even when playing badly, which we didn't take. It happens in football, just like how goals get disallowed (correctly in Palace's case btw).
We are where we are - the table doesn't lie. Were Leicester in a false position all of last season?
We finished 11th last year because we were the 11th best side, just as we were the 5th best side two years before that.
We've hit a rough patch and I'll be the first to say that we need to improve (and part of that will be the upcoming window where Walsh comes in) on recent performances. But I refuse to panic, or say that our season is over, based on one defeat and a draw - whoever it's against in the most competitive league in the world...
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