Developments continue apace on the new stadium set to become the new home of Everton Football Club in around eighteen months time.
The stadium project has been a hugely successful process and one that has been in a strange and almost total contradiction to the apparently never ending chaos and confusion that has aflicted Everton on the pitch.
While the Toffees’ have staggered from one football crisis to another seemingly unable to ever get it right, the new ground has continued to inexorably emerge from the rubble on the dock front of the city.
Various landmarks in the build have been reached with re-assuring regularity and today comes news that several key further structures have been put in place.
Now, two thirds of the stands are in place and the new stadium is nearly finished and ready for a Blues’ team to run out and play within its environs.
I will be sad to see the club leave Goodison Park. She has been showing her age recently of course, but the Grand Old Lady has been the Toffees’ home since they moved from Anfield way back in 1892.
The old ground has seen some outstanding teams grace the pitch, like the one built around arguably the greatest English centre-forward ever, Dixie Dean, in the twenties and early thirties.
Or the superb sides that appeared throughout the 1960s with players like Alex Young, Alan Ball, Howard Kendall, Brian Labone and Joe Royale catching the immagination at a time when the ‘school of soccer science’ was arguably at it’s peak.
Then there was the team I remember most foundly from my youth, when Everton finally re-emerged from the shadows as a powerful force in the game during the mid-eighties to robustly challenge Liverpool’s depressing dominance of that decade.
Down the years eight championships (the club’s first was claimed at Anfield the year before the move) five FA Cups and a European trophy have been paraded around the old ground. Not a bad haul, although it could and should have been more.
But of course, eventually all good things come to an end and you have to move on.
The question is now, what sort of Everton team will be taking to that pitch in a year and a half when the final piece of the stadium is in place and it’s been polished up and prepared. And, most importantly what league will that side be in?
At the moment this is obviously very uncertain to know. The Blues’ have put themselves in a terrible position through so much failure and confusion over the last few years and face another tortuous relegation fight this season.
Sean Dyche has made a solid enough start to his reign, the latest of seven men each of whom has tried to bring success to this club since Farhad Moshiri took control of it.
Six points from a possible nine is pretty good going and better than most of us hoped for I suspect, especially after that deadline day disaster when not a single new face was added to the squad.
We all have to hope he can sustain this decent beginning and keep this club in the top flight in which they have spent all but three of their 135 years playing English League football.