I tell you what - every single person connected to this club, be they players, managers, owners or fans, need to acquire a humbleness that's been absent from Everton since Moshiri came in.
I think if I were watching on from another club I'd be repulsed at the stunts that a classic English football club like Everton have been getting up to in half a decade of waste and profligacy and claims of imminent success. In fact, if I were a fan of another club I'd be cock-a-hoop at a club that's tried to be the new rich kids on the block and ended up as sad and humiliated parvenus falling flat on its face looking down the back of the couch again for cash to spend because they'd been spectacularly mis-governed.
It's time we rediscovered our identity as a hard working organisation that makes every opponent earn the right to take a single point off us...and every club need to pay top dollar for one of ours if they want one for themselves and we need to play hardball with them when they want too much for one of theirs.
That's not to say we cant achieve, just that we need to close the door on the tone and strategy of the first failed five years of the Moshiri period.
Asceticism, prudence and honest hard work. That's what we should be looking to. Players who dont want to be here can GTF out now because we have no need for them. And fans need to ditch the dreams of spending our way to success. That ship has sailed and sunk.
Yes all very good points. I think there's a lot in it too, that Moshiri tried to fundamentally alter what had worked before as opposed to looking to build on what was good. In completely breaking what went before, in simple terms, he doesn't have enough money to rebuild it back better. That;s the reality. I doubt anyone does, especially not with financial regulations.
It says a lot to me, that
Moyes and Martinez were given serious consideration. Two managers who 5 years ago would have been deemed just not good enough. I think each of them understood different aspects of the club (I'm not saying all aspects). I still think Moshiri would have been better building upon some of the positives, and using the liquidity to develop them further, as opposed to doing a very poor imitation of Chelsea.
What we might be seeing under Benitez (and I kind of hope we are) is some of the better aspects of what occurred under Smith, with hopefully not the drawbacks. Smith is probably judged harshly with hindsight, but with very little money, and a lack of trust in him from the board, he actually spotted and signed a number of solid, decent players for a pittance really. Our issue was, we were constantly selling players so could never get any consistency.
However if you would have got a combination of Steve Watson, Stubbs, Weir, Xavier, Gough, Materazzi, Ball, Hutchison, Dacourt, Gravesen, Carsley, Barmby (who I know he didn't sign but he rejuvinated), Campbell, Radzinski and Jeffers and actually kept most of them together, I think we could have been a top 6 team. There also lads like Gemmill, Pembridge, Unsworth, Linderoth etc who weren't world beaters, but were signed for low fees and never let us down. They were Alex Iwobi's but signed for next to nothing. Our issue was, we had to keep moving players on every summer so could never gel a squad.
I am seeing similar with Benitez. I've been critical of him in the article in as much as he is a fairly charmless man in all honesty. So was
Moyes though. But I can't knock the signings of Gray and Townsend. They seem like good buys to me for an absolute pittance.
