I think.
No.
I believe Everton’s board – the board of Everton Football Club – to be less use than a chocolate teapot. Because I can see NO evidence to the contrary. They should be ashamed of the way they are mismanaging almost every aspect of a once fine, noble-intentioned football club.
From the plans for a reduced size Bramley-Moore Dock stadium, announcing their essential and integral second-rate thinking, through the non-existent PR department – right to the shambles of their managerial-selection process they should be out on the arses and the sooner the better.
None of which is going to happen.
Lovely board-room I’m sure, lovely free coffees, lovely comfortable free seats and a great panoramic view of the shite they are responsible for. Not to mention, were they to crane their necks far enough, a lovely view of the Red Shite and How To Do Things properly.
Enough of them. They are not going to change and they are not going anywhere themselves either. Too much pocket-lining going on. Same as it ever was. Nothing has changed since the blank page of Len Shackleton’s chapter, ‘What the average football director knows about football.’
So, for us minions and fans, what is our response?
Where’s the light?
Where’s the hope?
Because there has to be hope.
A football club is a strange structure. At the bottom, flat end there are forty thousand people voting weekly with their hands in their pocket and hoping. Rising to a point on the blue pyramid where sit the few people who should affect the rest. And, in the middle, a squad of players and their coaches and trainers etc.
IF…
If Marco Silva were what Farhad Moshiri thought him to be, the man he made an allegedly dodgy approach to get for us – all would be – not mended – but obscured. That, at Everton, is the job of a successful manager and team – to obscure from view the ingrained naffness of the commercial side of the club, the second-rate penny pinching crocodile tear wiping of the boards’ plans and dealings.
But, alas, and the Wolves game presents the unanswerable facts – he ain’t.
I’m sure he’s a decent bloke, nice to his Mam and all that – when I listen he talks sense – but football is a tad more physical than that and – again – he ain’t. So. It seems clear to me there is no way, at this present moment, to raise this club from the pitch upwards.
The one light?
Marcel Brands. It is to be fervently hoped he was not co-opted on to the board in order to bring him into their complacent circle, to be taught their mantra. Whatever the f**k that might be.
He is the Director of Football and so I hope and I have to believe he must right now be thinking very seriously about who will replace Marco Silva – and when. He must also be identifying (I’m sure he has in truth – cos I have and most everyone else has too!) the great drifts of deadwood in a fat squad he needs to make so much leaner and meaner.
Everton FC are haemorrhaging money week in week out. That in itself is absolutely NO WAY to motivate young men to risk everything weekly for a belief. But, let’s get real. We have no belief. We as fans don’t have any now – because the team don’t demonstrate one.
This season we have been out-fought by Brighton, Leicester, West Ham – no disrespect intended – Wolves, Millwall etc etc etc. We do not have collective self-belief, self-evidently. And that, for me is the biggest negative of M.Silva.
So. Very radical solutions indeed are needed to correct the shop-floor so there is a squad that can raise the club, raise the fan base and – until the majority of the board do the decent thing and eff off – obscure the view and the behaviour going on in the boardroom of what D. Moyes (beautifully but obviously wrongly) identified as ‘The People’s Club.’
I don’t expect Everton to win every game. After fifty years of watching us I only ask that we play. That if we get beat all the team and the management can say, ‘Fair play, well done.’ That’s sport. What we have seen too many times this season for it to possibly continue like this – has not been that.
It has sometimes looked and felt like a bunch of young men thinking along the lines of ‘What’s the odds, we’re coining it anyway?’
And that is a philosophy, I believe, emanating from directly above them.
A Concerned Blue in France.