Hard to say.
The season before, ‘82/83 we were showing great promise.
Sharp, Heath, Reid, Ratcliffe were established in the team with Sheedy and Richardson starting to emerge.....though Neville had been sent out on loan after the trauma of the Glenn Keeley earlier on in the season
The winter of ‘83/84 was dire, though.
I think we went almost the whole month of December without scoring a goal.....though we did win at OT with a Sheedy goal one gloomy day in the bleak midwinter so that is probably not quite true.
But we won a cup tie at Stoke early in the New Year, the famous game where Howard’s team talk consisted of opening the dressing room window and telling the players to listen to the travelling Blues singing (yours truly among them

) and that gave us a lift.
We at least kept in both cups and obviously that kept interest in the season alive until Kevin Brock Day and the rest is history
I think however the biggest difference between then and now is that everyone connected with the club, from the Chairman to the charlady, knew that we were Everton, believed in Everton and had absolutely no doubt Everton would rise again.
Now we appear to have an owner and a manager who don’t.
Simple as.
And that IMO is the reason a deep depression has settled over Evertonia since Moshiri’s ill judged remarks after Burnley.
As an aside.....I often think of an alternative universe and what might have happened if we had got beaten at Oxford that night and Howard was fired as a result.
The talk at the time, when people were speculating as now about a successor, was for a certain dour manager in a remote part of Scotland whom was making a name fir himself.
Howard prevailed however
And another struggling north west team moved in for him about two years later.
He did quite well for them actually