One of them was saying it in the midst of the biggest financial crisis in this club's history. The other is saying it having spent over €120m in the summer, signed Jack Grealish, and moved into one of the best stadiums in the country.
Are Newcastle currently better than us? Yes. Was that the main reason they smashed us on Saturday? No. We got smashed because our manager couldn't rouse his players to a second brilliant performance in a week. Or any kind of performance. That can happen. Moyes should have come out there and put his hands up. Instead, he played the poor mouth (which is even harder to take when he refuses to play his €40m signing and can't seem to coach his €27m striker into netting a single goal). "Everton aren't at Newcastle's level. They would have needed to have an off-night and we would have had to have had a good night to beat them." Laughable deflection. They must be having an awful lot of off-nights, so, given they started three points below us.
What'll be his excuse if we lose tomorrow?
Nah, Moyes's words merely reinforce what many of us know and had hoped might be erased on Monday night. He'll always big himself up and talk this club down.
World has changed with the new owners for sure but even Jose Mourinho was talking about football heritage and little horses and that was when he was in charge of United and Chelsea winning trophies. It’s just what managers do.
If we gave managers better players results would improve. They’d improve more by that than us just asking them to change their mentality. If we had a manager failing to manage a top quality squad I could accept criticism a lot more but we give them an absolute pile of rubbish and then start battering them for saying games might be difficult in press conferences or that other teams are better than us.
It wouldn’t wash if we’d given Moyes or Dyche a top 6 squad but they can easily just turn around and point to no fit right backs, no quality striker, no depth at holding mid, one left back, no pace in the backline or midfield, and the squad is very injury prone. Dyche especially could point to being bottom of the league for net spend over 5 years.
If we ranked the squads in quality from 1 to 20 at the start of the season and took the manager out the equation then Everton’s would probably be in the bottom half behind the sky six, Newcastle, Villa, Palace, Forest, Brighton. Might be an argument over the bottom positions but you can see my point.
Moyes may well turn around at the end of the season with a top half finish and say what more can be expected given the squad he received.
It’s the same problem Everton have had for 30 years that we give the manager squads of a certain level and then expect significant continuous over performance. As soon as it doesn’t happen fans get annoyed.
It needs to start with sinking much more money into this squad and buying much better players with pace, technique, power, intelligence, leadership and resilience. It doesn’t start by moaning at the manager to ‘go for it more’ or being more positive in press conferences. It would be nice but doesn’t move the dial.