As we’re highlighting again today, the latest hyperbolic transfer rumours involving Everton are getting more and more inflated and unrealistic as the football lockdown continues.
So given that I thought I would do something different and start looking at my ten best Everton players since the end of the Second World War.
This is of course my list, so it might not be one that all Evertonians will agree with! But anyway hopefully it might provoke a bit of thought and if you disagree with my choices, let me know!
I wanted to restrict this to the post-WW2 era as I think its very difficult to accurately assess the majority of players, (apart maybe from greats like Dixie Dean and Tommy Lawton), from before that time, given the length of time since they played, lack of footage etc.
My first player is a key defensive performer from the club’s first outstanding teams following the War: Brian Labone.
Everton had struggled to match their inter-war years’ success in the forties and fifties, and it wasn’t until the club made the decision to appoint Harry Catterick as manager in 1961, that the Toffees fortunes began to change.
Catterick was a great choice as manager and while he rebuilt the side he inherited, he was fortunate to have several talented young players coming through at the time. One of them was a young scouse defender, Labone.
Labone was soon brought into the team at centre-half and quickly became an integral member of the 1962-63 championship winning team, the Blues first post-war title-wining side.
The strong but cultured Labone straight away became a stalwart in the Toffees team. He was one of the first names on the team sheet throughout the swinging sixties as Everton’s renowned ‘school of soccer science’ entertained supporters and critics alike.
Labone was a key player in the 1966 FA cup winning side and was still around and performing superbly when Goodison Park welcomed another championship success in 1969-70.
That 1970 team is one of the great unknowns in Blues history. The side that Catterick had assembled by then was a young, immensely talented, consistent and entertaining team.
The team had a defence built on Labone, England full-back Tommy Wright and Gordon West in goal, a midfield three famously nicknamed the ‘holy trinity’ of Howard Kendall, Colin Harvey and Alan Ball, and a strike-force led by the powerful young centre-forward Joe Royle, who had replaced Goodison Park idol Alex ‘Golden Vision’ Young.
Everton won the ’69-’70 title in superb fashion, finishing a full nine points clear of defending champions Leeds United, regarded by most as one of the best club sides in England since the war. And this was at a time too, when the English game only awarded two points for a win.
And yet despite all this excellence, the team failed to build on that success and quickly fell apart, a process symbolised by the controversial sale of Alan Ball to Arsenal, a few years later.
By 1970 Labone had also become a key player for his country too, and went to the 1970 World Cup playing alongside Bobby Moore in the heart of England’s defence as they tried to retain the trophy in Mexico.
The Everton centre-back had been unlucky to be playing at a time when there were a number of outstanding English central defenders around such as Moore, Jack Charlton and Norman Hunter and so he had limited international opportunities.
Labone was a one-club man spending all his career at Goodison Park and was undoubtedly one of the best and most consistent defenders in the clubs history. He retired having played an outstanding 533 times for the Blues.
The next player was a team-mate of Labone’s; Alan Ball.
Ball was one of the best players to grace English football in the sixties and early seventies and played for Blackpool, Everton Arsenal and Southampton as well as being a key member of Alf Ramsey’s 1966 World Cup winning team.
It was after that increasingly mythical-seeming triumph in the summer of ’66, that Everton manager Catterick moved to sign him for a then British record fee of £110,000.
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Paying such a sum now seems almost quaintly frugal given the vast amounts now outlayed on players in today’s transfer market, but it was a big deal in those days. However Ball proved his worth and he joined a Toffees midfield that proved to be one of the best in the first division.
The flame-haired Ball was a player with a great engine, combining tremendous energy and work rate with creative flair while playing normally on the right of the Blues famous midfield trio. Although he was in the old terminology an ‘outside-right’, in fact he often played more like a winger bursting down the flank to put in telling crosses for his strikers.
With his midfield partners, Kendall and Harvey, he helped Everton reach the 1968 FA cup final, (a game the Blues should have won but lost 1-0 to West Bromwich Albion), and then played an instrumental role in that ’70 title triumph.
But that superb young side slid to 14th in the first division the following season and in 1972, Ball was surprisingly and controversially sold to Arsenal for double his original price and another record transfer fee. His last first division game was for Southampton against Everton in 1982.