We’re off to Everton on Saturday. They’re not where they used to be.
There’s a bit of familiarity about Saturday’s forthcoming attraction. Opponents who play in blue, have been overshadowed for most of their existence by more successful neighbours, have had a succession of incompetent and boastful owners, who claim to be the proper club of their city and who had plans for a brand new state of the art ground for years. The difference is that theirs got built.
Welcome back to the most played and all that. This will be the first time it’s happened at an Everton ground where the away supporters can see all of the pitch, unless there were any of us up there when they were at Anfield. If there was, they probably had to pay the local urchins sixpence to mind their horse.
Everton, annoyingly, have got off to a good start this season. We, even more annoyingly, haven’t. They’ve got a manager we seem to come up against about six times a year and he’s looking less like a supporting actor in a Kay Mellor ITV drama series and more like he should be propping up the bar at Wetherspoons moaning that he gave her everything and she went and run off with his best mate.
Their under-21s coach is Paul Tait, and no it’s not that one. Theirs spent the biggest time of his career with Northwich Victoria so he was clearly the more successful of the two. They’ve also got a couple of midfielders they signed from us and another one who might get a bit of a mention.
A lot of things seem to start earlier these days, probably because of climate change, and one of them is the onset of the Villa injury crisis part of the season. We’ll probably have a couple of players making their debuts and they’re bound to fit in, no problem.
In such a historic fixture there’s always some traditions to be kept up, new ground or no. One of them’s Everton supporters moaning. The other’s Villa winning.
