Everton must make that Anfield feeling routine
Everton enjoyed a great night at Anfield on Saturday as they finally got that derby jinx off their backs. Now they must strive to make that sort of feeling a routine one – because that’s the mark of winners.
By routine I don’t mean that a derby win at their place will ever really be a run-of-the-mill experience. But Everton want to get to a position where such a win is expected of them more often than not and is a regular occurance not something seen as ‘historic’, an event that only happens once every two decades or so before normal service resumes.
Because for all the joy and release of pent up emotion that players and fans felt last weekend, in truth it should never have got to the point where Evertonians were waiting nearly twenty five years to beat Liverpool at Anfield.
The fact the Toffees hadn’t won there this century, is perhaps the clearest single indictor of how far our great club has sunk over the last few decades and how much we’ve again slipped behind Liverpool in results and expectation.
For most football fans today, certainly the younger generation who have grown up only knowing the Premier League, Everton are a club they have little knowledge of. Some probably don’t even know the club is in the city of Liverpool!
They may have heard of the odd fact like the Toffees were founder members of the football league in 1888 and have spent more seasons in the top flight of English football than any other club. Maybe they will know the odd player like Duncan Ferguson, but that’s about it.
I’m not criticising them for that and it’s not surprising as the Blues haven’t won anything since the 1995 FA Cup. That was an unexpected triumph in the middle of almost unrelenting nineties gloom and now it’s receeding into the mists of time – much like England’s fabled but increasingly mythical World Cup win of 1966.
Few supporters of other clubs will know of the great times in the past, like those mid-eighties days when Everton were the only club in the country consistently able to compete with their all-conquering neighbours.
Very few will know that the Toffees were once recognsied as the senior club on Merseyside and not just because they were founded first and built the Anfield Road ground, winning their first league championship in the stadium Liverpool now occupy.
They won’t know that it was Goodison Park and not Anfield that was choosen to host the Northwest’s World Cup group in that 1966 tournament, where the Everton faithful were able to watch players like Pele and Eusabio that summer.
The Blues were once regarded as part of English football’s elite and had up until the 1970s been one of the most consistently successful clubs in the game.
All that now is history or even nostalgia and of little relevance for most football people, young or old. But it underlines the challenge of reviving this club and the weight of expectation that wins such as Saturday’s at Anfield will awaken.
The challenge now is to try and make sure that results like that are not a temporary oasis of short-term satisfaction in a desert of mediocrity, but instead are what we can come to expect again from the team in royal blue. That would be a real legacy for Carlo Ancelotti to leave behind.