As Newcastle United fans filled St James’ Park to say farewell to Kevin Keegan, they unfurled a banner that ran almost the width of the Gallowgate End. It was his quote about glory.
“I want people to dream about their football club. They should. We should all be dreamers at heart. Some people are the opposite and say, ‘We can’t do that’. But when you ask them why, they can’t give a reason. Well, I say. ‘Why not?’”
That was the Sunday. On Tuesday, David Moyes, previewing Everton’s Carabao Cup tie at Preston, was asked about the importance of trophies.
He swatted the man from the Liverpool Echo away, pointing out that, although cups were important, remaining in the Premier League was more so.
That quote will not be appearing on a banner at the Hill Dickinson Stadium any time soon.
The Keegan quote at St James’ Park (Photo: Getty)Of course, Moyes is right. Relegation, or the fear of it, is something that is woven into the fabric of the club’s fanbase as well as its accountants. Ask an Everton supporter of a certain age to recount their most vivid memories and they will bring up the final days of the season in 1994 and 1998, when they swerved the abyss at the last possible moment.
The great image of recent years was the team bus nosing its way down Goodison Road lost in the smoke from the blue flares lit by supp0rters willing them to keep Everton in the top flight, where they had been since 1954.
As Moyes would know, there are other, more personal costs to relegation. Until he relegated them, he was briefly and disastrously manager of Sunderland. The club had built a sleek new training centre but suddenly there was no longer a receptionist to greet visitors or take phone calls. Sunderland could no longer afford one.
When a club goes down, it is always those in the marketing or hospitality departments and the stewards who are first up against the wall. At the London Stadium, Moyes was criticised for not playing “the West Ham way”. Without him, the West Ham way led to fixtures with Lincoln City rather than Liverpool.
And yet, glittering amid the wreckage and the £100m losses is the memory of that night in Prague, when West Ham overcame Fiorentina to win the Conference League.
It is pointless telling anyone who partied on the Charles Bridge that the Conference League is a piddling competition designed to bulk out television revenues for Europe’s minor clubs. It mattered and Moyes and his family who joined him at the Fortuna Arena would not forget it.
Moyes knows what it takes to win trophies – so why not aim higher? (Photo: Getty)That is what Moyes was being asked before Preston were emphatically dismissed 4-0 at Deepdale. Would it not be possible for Everton to have something of this?
It is 31 years since half a million came on to the streets of Merseyside as the Everton team bus, loaded with Labatt’s beer and blasting out Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero”, returned with the FA Cup. It is time for another song.
If you had to list Everton’s finest managers, Moyes might be ranked third behind Howard Kendall and Harry Catterick, who dealt in league titles, and perhaps just ahead of Joe Royle who won that 1995 FA Cup.
However, thinking of a moment to sum him up is harder. There have been no parades. My own is a moment when he was standing in the press room high up at Goodison Park after his first victory in the Merseyside derby.
Dressed in a dark suit and a grey cardigan that made him look like a young headmaster, he paused and gestured to the open window where songs from the tight, terraced streets were drifting in. That was 22 years ago.
He is now in the final year of his contract and there are signs of tension with the board. It was an odd time for the chairman, Dan Friedkin, to let it be known he regarded Everton’s non-qualification for Europe last season as “failure” and odd, too, that Moyes replied that he had not mentioned this to him – surely the ambition to play in Europe is understood?
A face-to-face conversation would admittedly be difficult since Friedkin has not yet managed to attend a single Everton game.
English domestic cups are notoriously hard to win from outside the Big Six. Only three teams have managed it in the last 20 Wembley finals – Leicester City, Newcastle and Crystal Palace.
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Keegan never won a trophy as a manager at either Newcastle or Manchester City but it did not stop him talking as if one was just at hand.
It was a showman’s talk, a politician’s talk, alien perhaps to Moyes, but the sort of thing that would be recognised by the man watching Everton’s smooth defeat of Palace on the opening day. The prime minister, Andy Burnham.
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