Summerskin
Player Valuation: £35m
Aww! Look at his little mush!
Before I eulogise on this largely peripheral (or "sh*te", as the Bullens would call it) figure, i'm going to say straight off the bat that I fooking loved Billy, I met him in Sopporos in town once and he was the soundest player i've ever met, i've even got the black & pink away shirt from that season with his name on the back & it's still the only Everton shirt I own that makes me feel slightly uneasy wearing in public.
I remember being on holiday in Turkey when we signed him, logged on to the dusty-ass PC from our hotel I (like many of us) struggled to prounounce his name as much as I struggled to comphrehend why we'd signed another left sided midfielder, especially for that much.
£9m? The boy must be bloody good, £9m for a club like Everton is nothing short of what Real Madrid forked out for Kaka ffs...off to Youtube I went.
Woah!: Look at this guy! More Cruyff turns than the Oranje maestro himself, an amazing shot and a good eye for the cute pass, looked like this guy could provide that little bit of flair that the dogged & hard working 08-09 side sorely lacked in times of uninspiring Wembley appearances, especially with the little Spaniard out for God knows how long...
...it just never really worked out did it? I think we're all in agreement in that the lad could seriously play the game, but after 2 and a half years he still looked as out of his depth as he did in his first couple of Premier League appearances. It's an old cliché that foreign players struggle to adapt to the pace and aggression of our game but that analogy could certainly be used on ol' Dini, the fact that he looked 8st wet through didn't help but over time we all come to realise that his noggin held part of the reason why he could never kick on at Everton too.
He's clearly a bit Torres, taking the boo-boys words to heart far too easily but I think Moyes played his part in Dini's (un)success story too, rarely giving the lad consistent time on the pitch despite his old guard (I.e. anyone we've signed from Manchester United) swaggering into the team and producing the square root of [Poor language removed] all most weeks.
We all knew he had it in his locker though, that's what was so frustrating...the 30 yard screamer that cannonned off the post at BATE, the first time 60 yard cross field pass to Saha that Alonso would've been happy with & the occasional ace set piece all gave us that glimmer of hope, but Dini himself never ever took any of his positives into his next game.
Of course, being stuck out wide in England means you need to have a certain amount of legs on you, bizarrely the Daily Fail produced a list of the fastest players in England and Dini held the top spot for Everton despite looking like he was pulling a caravan with the ball at his feet.
This of course led to the standard "if he's not doing it out wide give him the "free role" behind a striker" shouts from us Blues, myself included. It just made sense didn't it? Sack him off the defensive duties and let him smash anything that drops to him in the back of the net, despite the bulk of his goals coming from a no.10 position one selection in centre mid against Tamworth in 2012 was all he got before he headed back to his homeland...Cahill clogging up that position to no effect for 18 months certainly didn't help his cause, but hey ho...
If there's one thing we can all applaud him for, it was his goals; Honestly, the strikes against Utd, Portsmouth and Wolves will go down as some of the most spectacular goals in recent Everton history; his shimmy and volley against Birmingham and the Sheedy-esque finish against Athens were class too, not to mention his lovely one-touch finish against Villa.
Easy to be the scapegoat for his lack of pace, power or any sign of consistently, Billy got it good style from the folk at L4 but I loved him; A proper sound lad with a terrific attitude towards his job, perhaps he was just too nice? Whether he starts to smash it back in Russia and returns to the national squad we'll have to see, but I for one always dug the little Meerkat.
Maybe I just always want the underdog to succeed, I do support Everton afterall...
