He's taking the piss now, 'full throttle ', my arse.Looking forward as well to the team 'going for the jugular.'
Inside Moyes' Everton plans with determined boss intent on going 'full-throttle'
The Blues boss is set to ensure standards remain high as he demands the best from his players over second half of seasonwww.liverpoolecho.co.uk
Inside Moyes' Everton plans with determined boss intent on going 'full-throttle'
The Blues boss is set to ensure standards remain high as he demands the best from his players over second half of season
06:00, 13 Jan 2026
Updated 06:14, 13 Jan 2026
David Moyes looks on during the warm up prior to the Premier League match between Everton and Brentford. Photo by Alex Livesey/Getty Images(Image: )
David Moyes is keen for Everton to push for Europe this season despite a difficult week of results. The Blues missed a golden opportunity to consolidate their position in the top half of the league after a home defeat to Brentford and a draw with bottom-of-the-table Wolverhampton Wanderers.
The FA Cup defeat to Sunderland on Saturday rounded off a miserable six days for the club, leaving it at a crossroads for the rest of the campaign.
For Moyes, the hope is that his team can use the success of the season so far as a platform to push for further progress given that the Premier League table is so congested, with his side still just four points from fifth despite recent tough results. He said: “I want us to be full-throttle all the time.”
That proximity to the upper echelons of the table follows an impressive 12 months for Moyes, who returned to Everton one year ago on Sunday. He took over a club just two points clear of the bottom three and destined for a fifth consecutive relegation fight but inspired a surge of form that carried the club to safety well before Easter.
One of the primary goals of his second stint is to ensure a trait he felt he inherited at the start of his first reign does not undermine the rest of a season he believes remains full of potential.
Reflecting on his first period as Everton boss last week, speaking before the Wolves game, he said he felt he arrived at a club that appeared to secure safety by Easter and then switch off for the rest of the campaign.
He said: “I remember it got my goat up when I was here and I had to fight to sort of change that. We were going right to the end, we were fighting right to end and we were going to keep going. I think in my second year, it probably nearly happened to me.. we got to Easter time and sort of turned off and we lost it. I don't want that here, I want us to be full-throttle all the time.
“Obviously, being full-throttle means that you're going to blow up sometimes, you're not always going to have it right and we're not always going to have all the players… but I want to try to push to get a higher league position and if I don't and we stay as a pretty safe, mid-table team, I don’t think it would be too bad a position.”
Moyes was able to do that last season - some of the best of the nine away wins he secured in 2025 came after the club’s safety was confirmed, including the feel-good successes at Fulham and Newcastle United. He also ensured Everton said goodbye to Goodison Park with a win, his team defeating Southampton 2-0 in the final senior men’s game at the club’s historic home.
Repeating that is now his ambition, with the hope that it could lead to a surprise charge for Europe. The foundation for a season devoid of jeopardy certainly appears to have been laid - Everton look set to avoid a survival fight already. The club started the year in eighth place and remained 15 points clear of the relegation zone even after last week.
There is an acceptance from Moyes that his squad still has its weaknesses and noises from the club so far this month suggest the approach to any transfer business will be cautious and opportunistic. His dressing room remains threadbare despite a busy summer and a concoction of injuries, suspensions and Africa Cup of Nations commitments has been the catalyst for the recent tough results - he was without nine senior players on Saturday including, in Jack Grealish, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall, Jarrad Branthwaite, Iliman Ndiaye and Idrissa Gueye, five of his most important.
The loss of Ndiaye and Gueye to Senegal’s bid for glory was always set to pose a challenge for the festive period and the injuries that have piled up around their absence has intensified an already difficult challenge.
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Asked to reflect on where the defeat to Sunderland left his season on Saturday, he displayed an acceptance that what happens next will be defined by when, and with what success, his players return. He said: “What I want to do is to get back to the levels that we were playing at in recent months and recent weeks. I want to get the players back, but I couldn’t say that I was surprised with the results with what we were going to have available to us in certain games. A lot of it is by our own doing and we have to take responsibility for that, we had players sent off in the last game so that is our fault, but it is very difficult when we are picking up injuries and with the boys at AFCON it was always going to make this a really difficult month.”
But while those absences were painful and will, for the most part, continue into a tricky fixture at title-chasing Aston Villa on Sunday, Moyes appears determined to push the players as far as they can go this season in the hope they can get the European qualification he believes could turbocharge the club’s progression.
Asked ahead of the game with Wolves whether, if the week [including the FA Cup match] ended badly, he would prefer to go for the ‘jugular’ and maintain an assault on the higher reaches of the table or take stock and start exploring his squad with a view towards building for the summer and next season, he said: “I want to go for the jugular. I want to get Everton there as quick as I can. And while I've got a chance, I want to try and do it if I can.”
arse.
Shot across the bows of the owners and administration that IMO.
