NEVER AGAIN (Again)

….Now is the nuclear winter of our discontent.

It’s May 7th 1994. I’m thirteen years old. As Everton were battling a tough-as-nails Wimbledon at Goodison, 2-0 down and desperate to somehow stay afloat and escape the Sarlacc pit of relegation, I was in my living room. Listening to the radio.

My dad was at the bottom of the garden. Away from any news. I went down with occasional messages. When the full time whistle blew, and we both realised that we’d miraculously escaped relegation - that Everton had lived to fight another day - Dad opened a bottle of Champagne. He recorded Match of the Day, and slapped a sticker on the spine of the videotape. I still remember what he wrote on there: “7th May, 1994. The day our club was reborn, a new dawn!!!”

I remember the sinking feeling when we were 2-0 down to Wimbledon in 1994. It’s a similar feeling to Everton - Bournemouth just a few days ago when Leicester were winning their game and the live league table had us in the relegation zone. But the feeling at the final whistle? Completely different. I didn’t want to dance around. Corks weren’t popping. I wasn’t happy.

Sean Dyche is completely right. This isn’t something to celebrate. We need to change. It’s fine to say - to scream - “NEVER AGAIN” from the rooftops. But we keep on screaming this. We keep on saying “NEVER AGAIN” again and again. It means nothing, as empty a declaration as the latin motto on our shirts. It’s exhausting.

Now is the nuclear winter of our discontent.

It all started several summers ago, when our Director of Football and Manager botched our summer squad surgery so badly that we’ve had to undergo several disastrous corrective operations since.

The cliche is that there’s no *I* in *TEAM* but it’s equally true for Everton that you don’t spell *SUCCESS* with a *$*… Us fans were just happy to have some money for once.

Instead of making do with pressing our faces to the transfer window and mournfully staring at the happy shoppers inside, this time we could take part in the madcap trolley dash! And as that summer ended we were more than happy to hold aloft our “We Won The Transfer Window” trophy.

It was only when the season started that everything came crashing down.

Our sky-scraping ambitions were met with barrel scraping reality.

It turns out that Koeman and Walsh, the supposed masterminds who would bring home the transfer bacon, couldn’t agree at all. Like squabbling siblings, the only answer they could come up with was to buy the players Walsh wanted AND the players Koeman wanted, despite many playing in the same position.

It beggars belief that we could splurge on our “Three Tenners” - Sigurdsson, Klaassen, and Rooney - and forget about a left back.

Or perhaps we didn’t forget. Perhaps we assumed that a 33 year old Leighton Baines would be more than capable of playing in the Premier League, Europa League, FA Cup, and Cara-bloody-bao Cup without succumbing to injury…

Everton’s mistakes repeat like rotten history, like the plaintive cry of NEVER AGAIN (again) — with us doing almost exactly the same thing with Seamus Coleman that we did with Leighton Baines.

It wasn’t just a left back that we missed out on in that madcap summer. Somehow we managed to ship off Lukaku to Man Utd and not buy a striker.

NEVER AGAIN (again)

Yet this year we did the same, trying to survive a season with one injured striker, DCL.

I preferred us when we were skint. And I miss our blue collar players. The ones who actually give a sh*t.

We’ve become a horrendous half-baked layer cake. We obsessively added more ingredients, more managers, thinking that it will taste better. But the players didn’t even know each other.

We are a horror movie, and not even a good one, I Know What You Did Last Summer's incompetent footballing sequel: I really don’t have a f*cking clue what I did last summer.

Even now, some fans kind of want this madness to continue. They aren’t sure Dyche is the one for us. Despite keeping us up after spending nothing. Despite making us play for the shirts. In the last day, looking at West Ham’s european trophy, many have unironically been pining for David Moyes, while ignoring the similar manager we have fighting for us.