Everton are up next at Villa Park. They’ve been here before.
Sunday comes, and with it the latest instalment of… altogether now… the Most Played Top Flight Fixture. It’s still hanging on in there despite us doing our best to lose it a few years ago and them not doing enough a bit later. They circled the drain for as long as we did but managed to pull themselves out of it and have now settled for mid-table mediocrity.
So with our record safe for another season at least, Everton will turn up at Villa Park with fear and trepidation in their hearts. They won’t turn up with Idrissa Gueye, who’s at Afcon (he’s 36 now and no, I don’t know where the years went either). They probably won’t have the injured Tim Iroegbunam, who we swapped for Lewis Dobbin; it’s safe to say who got the best of that deal. It’s also safe to say Dobbin won’t be in many more match previews.
But they will, of course, have Jack Grealish, whose presence will no doubt be a source of some argument amongst our supporters. He’s gone and he isn’t good enough to come back so let’s treat him with the same air of superiority shown to every other player with every other club. They aren’t playing for us so they can’t be as good as any of ours. David Moyes is still their manager and he still looks like the chief suspect in an ITV crime drama.
We’ve got a few of their ex-players and just for a change most of them are injured. We’ll probably have another couple go on the missing list between now and then. Not that it makes any difference, because whoever plays the result will still be the same They’ll sing that dirge about knowin’ yer ‘istory, although if they did know anything about ‘istory they’d realise that theirs doesn’t match ours. Neither does their present or future. Three more points and on we go.
