Moyes & Neville

After yet another under accept­able per­for­mance from an Ever­ton team devoid of gen­uine guile the news from the physio was worse than hoped but exactly as expected.  The writhing on the floor of Phil Neville fol­low­ing a bru­tal scyth­ing from Dick­son Etuhu sug­gested a debil­i­tat­ing ail­ment against the cur­rent cli­mate of forg­eries and feign­ers.  Neville was feign­ing nothing.

The stretcher bear­ers car­ried Neville form the field of play and next day assess­ment con­demned his absence to noth­ing more spe­cific than ‘lengthy’.  Per­haps the first bit of luck that Ever­ton have had this season.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/e/everton/8255217.stm

http://www.evertonfc.com/news/archive/neville-has-ligament-damage.html

Neville has been an excel­lent piece of busi­ness for Ever­ton and the trans­ac­tion to bring him to the club for a miserly £3.5 mil­lion takes some beat­ing in the Moyes cat­a­logue of tri­umphant pur­chases.  At the time an infe­rior club like Ever­ton regarded it a coup to pick up an Eng­land inter­na­tional boast­ing nearly sixty caps and drag­ging with him a vet­eran expe­ri­ence of the Man­ches­ter United win­ning machine.  The nom­i­nal fee rep­re­sented a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of the spend­ing bud­get at the dis­posal of David Moyes and he dis­posed of it with great incite.

Neville brought with him not only the appli­ca­tion and apti­tude to be a ver­sa­tile con­trib­u­tor to more posi­tions than the karma sutra; he also car­ried the legacy of a vast and dec­o­rated nur­tur­ing under Alex Fer­gu­son.  This wealth of expe­ri­ence all came at a bar­gain bud­get price much to the grat­i­tude of Moyes and to the delight of Neville’s new ador­ing Ever­ton pub­lic.  His mete­oric rise to the cap­taincy was rapid and unques­tioned.  His whole­hearted expo­sure on the match day field mar­ried with the require­ments of the team.  The wound left by Lee Carsley’s defec­tion back to Birm­ing­ham resulted in Neville shift­ing from his recog­nised berth at right full­back to the role of a cen­tral mid­field destroyer that he had occa­sion­ally occu­pied in his Man Utd grandeur.  This tac­ti­cal deploy­ment revi­talised Everton’s Pre­mier­ship resilience and for­tunes changed on the back of Neville’s relocation.

Under the guid­ance of Moyes Ever­ton con­tin­ued to grow and the cal­i­bre of player attracted the club raised to a higher ech­e­lon.  Instead of Cham­pi­onship play­ers and retir­ing celebri­ties Ever­ton and the stature of Moyes were able to bring in good qual­ity Euro­pean play­ers with good Euro­pean expe­ri­ence.  This influx meshed well with the refresh­ing phi­los­o­phy to allow any tal­ent from the youth ranks to blos­som inside the integrity of the club and not decay out on loan at some six month sab­bat­i­cal in some sub­or­di­nate divi­sion.  An imag­i­na­tive blend of val­ues indeed.  What this did mean for Ever­ton was that for the first time in almost twenty years the man­ager finally had some options.

I’m a huge advo­cate of David Moyes; I feel he runs his pro­gram with great hon­our and with great dig­nity.  And also with great abil­ity.  I’m grate­ful for his ser­vice to the club and I would be happy for him to dou­ble his tenure at Ever­ton.  How­ever, I do feel that Moyes cur­rently lacks the same ele­gance or under­stand­ing that some of the true stu­dents of the game com­mand, stu­dents such as Wenger or Fer­gu­son.  Twice dur­ing his time at Ever­ton Moyes has won the LMA (League Mangers Asso­ci­a­tion) high­est acco­lade of Manger of the Year; high praise indeed when voted for by your peers.  Though I do ques­tion the valid­ity of his nom­i­na­tion and I do ques­tion whether Moyes is the most deserv­ing.  Twice.

Since his incep­tion at the club Moyes has been a strict pro­po­nent of and rarely devi­ated form the notion that play­ing your best eleven play­ers is the cor­rect course of action, regard­less of the oppo­si­tion and regard­less of the com­pe­ti­tion.  With unerr­ing reg­u­lar­ity Moyes will play the best eleven play­ers avail­able.  And with lim­ited excep­tion; when a player is injured or sus­pended Moyes will select the twelfth best player to play in his place.  If another player gets injured then the thir­teenth best player will play, and so on.  Under Moyes the man­age­ment of the team works on a cab rank prin­ci­ple.  Very lit­tle time or strat­egy is wasted on the intri­ca­cies of tac­ti­cal refine­ment.  Pick your best eleven play­ers, charge them up and send them out.  And keep shout­ing from the side­line until you win.

I’m doing David Moyes a bit of a dis­ser­vice there, but he very much falls into a cat­e­gory of basic foot­ball man­age­ment whereas other fall into the realms of gen­uine strate­gists and eru­dite schol­ars.  Surely the task of Wenger or Fer­gu­son is a greater oblig­a­tion than that of Moyes and thus more wor­thy of acco­lades.  Okay, the mil­lion dol­lar squad at Man Utd or Arse­nal means that Fer­gu­son and Wenger are start­ing from a more lucra­tive van­tage, but the del­i­cate nature of hav­ing to align all of those mav­er­ick per­spec­tives is mind bog­gling.  Oppo­si­tion team tac­tics can be dis­sected and coun­ter­acted with sub­tle exploita­tion and with aca­d­e­mic tin­ker­ing of for­ma­tion or per­son­nel.  Plan­ning and plot­ting the cor­rect path with a squad that has enu­mer­ate choice and flam­boy­ant con­no­ta­tions is far more impres­sive than merely pick­ing the stan­dard first team sub­tract­ing what­ever alter­ation ill­ness and injury dictate.

Some per­ti­nent exam­ples in the recent rhetoric of Moyes and his stub­born inabil­ity to devi­ate from the ‘best eleven play­ers’ approach to foot­ball man­age­ment appear dra­mat­i­cally obvi­ous after the event.  Mikel Arteta was an incan­des­cent bea­con shin­ning amongst the prag­ma­tism of an Ever­ton team most noted for blud­geon­ing malev­o­lent low scor­ing vic­to­ries.  Yet the major­ity of Arteta’s time was spent stranded on the right flank, and occa­sion­ally redun­dant on the left, escorted by a cen­tral mid­field lack­ing the abil­ity to ser­vice him with pos­ses­sion.  Arteta’s con­tri­bu­tion became inte­gral and cameo all at the same time.  The eval­u­a­tion to shift Arteta into the mid­dle of the field took years to appraise on Moyes and yet the returns were instant.  My pref­er­ence was to have Arteta play as the sec­ond striker in the Bergkamp mould, but the cen­tre mid­field berth remains a far bet­ter option than the iso­la­tion of a wide midfield.

A sim­i­lar anec­dote fol­lowed the delayed intro­duc­tion of Leighton Baines to the start­ing team.  After the expense of lur­ing him from Wigan Moyes opted to play three cen­tral defend­ers across a back four, even if one had to play out of posi­tion at left full­back.  Lescott sub­se­quently played for Eng­land and was sold for £24 mil­lion as a cen­tral defender and not as a left full­back.  Baines remained with­held until Moyes took a lit­tle too long to appre­ci­ate his work rate and his wand of a left foot.  Baines could argue being the sec­ond best left full­back in Eng­land, not just the sec­ond best left full­back at Everton.

On a more imme­di­ate note, dur­ing the Ful­ham deba­cle Ever­ton were chas­ing the game with eleven min­utes to go and we had played the entire game devoid of any­thing resem­bling coher­ent and pen­e­tra­tive foot­ball.  The Moyes deci­sion was to throw on Yakubu for Osman and with him fol­lowed a wish for a mir­a­cle.  There was no sub­tle tin­ker­ing of for­ma­tion, there was no gen­uine rede­ploy­ment of troops, there was no refine­ment in the direc­tives to the full­backs, Pien­aar was not asked to shift infield to pro­vide the miss­ing piece of sophistication…etc.  Yakubu = Goal!  Not this time.  And not with­out some more exec­u­tive coaching.

Any­way, under the stew­ard­ship of Moyes Ever­ton con­tinue to flirt with the top end of the game as Euro­pean nights are becom­ing a sta­ple at Good­i­son Park and Sat­ur­day con­tent­ment is becom­ing more of an expec­ta­tion rather than a rare and ran­dom treat.  How­ever, in the vein that we have dis­cussed above the Ever­ton team is at a moment of tran­si­tion and the future prog­no­sis of advance­ment bal­ances on the chance of David Moyes to recog­nise that.

While Phil Neville brings an indis­pens­able per­son­al­ity to the game he also brings a style of mid­field play that foot­ball at this level regards as obso­lete.  If Ever­ton are going to breach the top four, or indeed resist the very evi­dent threats of Man­ches­ter City and Spurs, then we can only do so with a mid­field blessed with more cre­ativ­ity.  And Neville just does not fall into that cat­e­gory.  When you con­sider the mid­field options of bet­ter teams than Ever­ton you sim­ply will not find a mis­fit full­back play­ing there, no mat­ter how many Eng­land caps they’ve won and irre­spec­tive of personality.

The con­tem­po­rary mid­field demands that play­ers must be able to play foot­ball and demol­ish oppo­si­tion foot­ball in equal pri­or­ity, fail­ure to have a full com­mand of a full reper­toire of skills just won’t sur­vive at this stan­dard of foot­ball.  Ever­ton require craft and intel­lect along with the given bru­tal author­ity in the cen­tre of the field and they have play­ers avail­able to do that.

I’m not sure Moyes was ever going to replace Neville by his own voli­tion.  Now he has to.

From The Writ­ings Of Jonny Carter

www.JonnyCarter.com