Finally got round to seeing this.
Yes, a telling contribution to rescuing that 80s team from being ignored by the "Football started with the Premier League" generation.
However, a few observations:
- Too much time was given over to Liverpool. Yes, they were there to get past and therefore had to be addressed, but this is an Everton documentary about us and should have minimized them. The only time that lot should be in a documentary about that Everton team is to pay tribute to Everton's 5 year period of dominance. I think an opportunity was missed to position Kendall's Everton as the club that actually knocked Liverpool off their perch - something pretty much conceded by SAF, btw. Films like this are a chance to control the narrative, and the makers of it missed a trick there.
- More generally, there should have been other figures outside of Everton / Everton fans paying their tribute to a truly great English team; ex-players and managers, domestic and foreign (so not Tyldsley and Rosenthal, who were a bit of an embarrassment, tbh). The absence of that dimension meant we got no sense of the scope of Everton's domestic and international achievement.
- A tonal criticism: I felt that, although we we were successfully portrayed through the lens of what we hadn't done in the decade or so before the 1984 (success in the 60's / early 70s and standards falling, and the 80s bringing us back to those standards), it was what little we achieved after the 80s which set an almost apologetic tone for the whole piece - that what came later has diminished the club. The last 30 years should never have reared its head in a documentary celebrating a particular period of riches for the club. I doubt many other clubs would have had their latter barren spells haunting a glory piece about their heyday. We are very good at self-flaggelation and that's what came across too loudly for me.
- Overall - and as someone who experienced it as a late teenager / early 20s - that programme for me never fully conveyed the utter (and merited) arrogance we all had about the club; we were imperious as a team and the fans (certainly the ones I knew) never had much doubt about the outcome of any match from very early on in the glory period: spring of '84 through to when we fell away again in '88. I and others got to have that feeling that fans of clubs like United in the 90s and noughties and Madrid (forever) have been privileged to experience. To me that barely came across.
I'm not saying Howard's Way was an opportunity lost. It wasn't. It was a great leap forward in the presentation of the 80s teams (though, and btw, I'd like to have seen more on the Lineker team
and the rejigged '87 team which really did emphasise HK's greatness - the additions of players like Pointon, Power, Clarke, Watson, Snodin were an example of his brilliance as a manager). But it emphasised more the chemistry of a clutch of first team star players rather than underline the enormous achievement of HK placing the club at the top of domestic and European football for a period. The lens needed to be much wider than that (and, yes, I acknowledge budget limitations in not doing so, but I'm just making that general critique).
