tadpole
Player Valuation: £15m
Twelve months ago we were bemoaning the fact that after knocking Chelsea out of the cup we'd gone and lost to Reading. What did people say then ? "That's the Everton way" - implying that it's the easier games that are the problem for us, not the bigger games.
Look, it's the nature of a cup competition that each game is a little bit bigger than the last. So the game where you get knocked out is always going to be in an important sense the "biggest" game. Even leaving that aside, if you look back over the last 20 years, we've been in three FA Cup semis and two finals. We were very much the underdogs in 4 of those games, the last one the chances were more even. We got three wins and two defeats. Not bad for a team that "bottles" the big games.
Does our record against Liverpool prove otherwise ? 2012, like 1986, will go down as a massive opportunity missed : an occasion when we were good enough to win, were in front, and blew it. But remember this : Liverpool had never played at the new Wembley before this month. We had. And we earned that right by knocking - guess who - Liverpool out of the cup in 2009.
When teams do bottle big games the causes are psychological : fear, and lack of belief. Maybe Liverpool just had more belief than us on the day. But I just don't see that we need to build this up into some big problem. The squad have shown that they have the strength and the belief to take on the big guns and to win a good percentage of the time. Whether we'll win any trophies under Moyes who knows, but don't rule it out just yet.
Look, it's the nature of a cup competition that each game is a little bit bigger than the last. So the game where you get knocked out is always going to be in an important sense the "biggest" game. Even leaving that aside, if you look back over the last 20 years, we've been in three FA Cup semis and two finals. We were very much the underdogs in 4 of those games, the last one the chances were more even. We got three wins and two defeats. Not bad for a team that "bottles" the big games.
Does our record against Liverpool prove otherwise ? 2012, like 1986, will go down as a massive opportunity missed : an occasion when we were good enough to win, were in front, and blew it. But remember this : Liverpool had never played at the new Wembley before this month. We had. And we earned that right by knocking - guess who - Liverpool out of the cup in 2009.
When teams do bottle big games the causes are psychological : fear, and lack of belief. Maybe Liverpool just had more belief than us on the day. But I just don't see that we need to build this up into some big problem. The squad have shown that they have the strength and the belief to take on the big guns and to win a good percentage of the time. Whether we'll win any trophies under Moyes who knows, but don't rule it out just yet.
