Highs, Lows and Bakayokos

Jim Keoghan

Description

The 1990s, what a time to be an Evertonian! After a decade of success in the 1980s which saw cup and league wins, the 1990s brought brushes with relegation, financial ups and downs, a club drifting without purpose; it was a decade that saw Everton fall irrevocably off the pace, abandoning a long-held position as a member of English football's elite. There were still some games which won't fade from the memory, silverware and moments of unadulterated elation. Highs, Lows and Bakayokos evaluates the causes of Everton's troubles; examines why peers raced away, grasping the opportunities presented by the new Premier League era; and ultimately sets out to rescue and redefine an unfairly maligned decade and its emotional intensity and capacity to thrill that has perhaps been all-too-absent for Evertonians in the recent era of stability.

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing
• Date de parution: 26 août 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785312502
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2016
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Jim Keoghan, 2016
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 978-1-78531-189-5
eBook ISBN 978-1-78531-250-2
---
Ebook Conversion by www.eBookPartnership.com
Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Introduction
The Great Escape (Part I)
The Great Escape (Part II)
Where Had It All Gone Wrong? (Part I)
Where Had It All Gone Wrong? (Part II)
Come Hell Or Mike Walker
Royle Coronation
The Dogs Of War
A Royle Revival?
Never Go Back (Again)
The Great Escape II
Mr Smith Goes To Nowhere In Particular
What Does It All Mean?
Bibliography
Photographs
Acknowledgments
F IRST I would like to thank my mum, who cajoled, bribed and threatened me in an effort to ensure I chose the correct club to follow. It was an act of parental abuse that I am forever grateful for. I moved to the light and away from the dark side, which at that point had been drawing me towards Anfield. Despite the years of anxiety, disappointment and abject frustration, becoming a Blue is a decision I have never once regretted.
With regard to the book, I would like to say a big thanks to everyone who agreed to be interviewed. Each person featured has been exceptionally generous with their time and I hope that they re satisfied with the outcome.
Special thanks need to go to my dad, Brian Keoghan, for invaluable research assistance, Dave Cockram and Tony Murrell, for helping me secure important interviewees, Greg Murphy for his unrivalled understanding of the Everton boardroom, Patrick Hart for using his encyclopaedic Everton knowledge to pick holes in the book, Graham Ennis for agreeing to meet on a cold winter s night outside Goodison and Becky Tallentine for one of the most enjoyable interviews I ve ever undertaken.
Several newspapers have been kind enough to allow me to reproduce their work for which I would like to say thanks. These are The Guardian , Liverpool Echo , The Evertonian , The Times , The Independent and The Mirror .
I have also used quotes from a number of publications. These are: Only the Best is Good Enough: Howard Kendall Story , Everton: The School of Science , The Binman Chronicles , Howard Kendall, Love Affairs Marriage: My Life in Football , Colin Harvey s Everton Secrets - 40 years at Goodison from Catterick to Moyes , Goodison Glory: The Official History and Joe Royle, The Autobiography . I am thankful for the permission provided by authors and publishers.
At Pitch Publishing I m grateful to Paul for giving me this opportunity and would like to thank everyone else there who ve been involved with the creation of the book.
On a personal level, Emma and Jamie have provided a welcome and much needed distraction. I am often squirrelled away at my desk for hours, lost in a world of relegation dog-fights, boardroom turmoil and the inexplicable horror of Mike Walker s reign of terror, so it s nice to get way from all of that and spend time with the best children I could have ever asked for.
But I save my biggest thanks, as always, for Nicky, without whom there would be no book. You have helped me throughout the process, reading and re-reading a subject area upon which you have no interest, patiently correcting my appalling grasp of spelling and grammar and pretending to be interested by my discussions of the minutia of 1990s Evertonia. You still don t make anywhere near enough cups of tea for me (if any) but I can forgive that for the unconditional support you ve provided every single day.
Foreword
T HE 1990s was a difficult time for Everton. The club entered the decade as one of the biggest in the country and by the end, we were well off the pace. At the start, when Colin Harvey was manager, I doubt anyone could have foreseen the decade that was to come.
Back then, we had a good side. It might not have been as great as those that Howard Kendall had put together but it was still one capable of doing so much better than it did. It s still something that I find frustrating, that Everton under Colin didn t win anything or continue the momentum we had under Howard Kendall.
But although we weren t winning things, we were still a force in the game, one of those regularly tipped as a potential title contender. By the end of the decade though, any sense of Everton challenging for the top had gone. The team that ended the 1990s under Walter Smith paled by comparison to the sides of the 1980s and it was one much more likely to be fighting for survival than trying to get into Europe.
Football is a game that is filled with ups and downs and any club is capable of going through difficult times. But you get the sense that the 1990s was more than just a difficult period for us. It was a time when Everton first fell behind those clubs that had always been our equals.
Why this happened is something that I will leave for this book to explore. But whatever the reasons, it seems obvious that Everton ended that decade in a different place than it entered it; no longer one of the game s bigger guns.
Although I wasn t at Everton for the entire 1990s, I was still there for some of the key moments that took place and continued to follow the club s struggles after I left.
For some people, I imagine it s the low points that probably stick out, the seasons dogged by relegation threats, those periods when we seemed unable to win a game, the times when the finances of the club were in a terrible mess.
In particular, Wimbledon in 1994 and Coventry in 1998 stand out, two matches when Everton came very close to going down. The fact that we didn t is something that all Evertonians should be grateful for. Who knows what would have happened if we had. The second tier can be a very difficult division to get out of.
But alongside the gloom there were good times too; great games, seasons where the side gelled, derby games that won t be forgotten. It s easy to forget the good when there was so much bad. We beat some great sides during that decade, produced performances of undeniable class and put one over our neighbours more than once.
And best of all, we won the FA Cup. And we did that by beating Manchester United, in my opinion the best side around at the time. The point of following a club is the hope that you can have moments like 1995, a great cup run that ended with success. The Goodison trophy room hasn t seen any further additions since that great day, so it s something that we should all cherish and celebrate. Winning the FA Cup was a fantastic achievement, something that few clubs manage and possibly Everton s greatest moment in the past 25 years.
Plenty of other periods in Everton s history have been raked over, not least the 1980s. But the 1990s, perhaps because of its negative reputation, has been mostly ignored. Highs, Lows and Bakayokos addresses that omission and is a welcome addition to those other books that have charted the history of this great football club.
Neville Southall
Introduction
F EW football clubs enjoy uninterrupted success. And Everton are no exception. Throughout the club s long history there have been highs and lows, successes and failures, good times and Mike Walker times. Relegation has been suffered, mediocrity tolerated, lengthy periods endured when the trophy cabinet has remained resolutely locked.
But through it all, for most of the club s history, there was the belief that success was just around the corner. And so it often proved. The dreadful 1950s were followed by the glorious 1960s, and the disappointing 1970s by the bountiful 1980s. Even when the club was relegated in the 1920s, it bounced back a few seasons later to claim Everton s fourth First Division title.
Like others that had come before, the 1990s was another one of those difficult times. It was a period when title challenges fell by the wayside to be replaced first by seasons of mediocrity and then, more worryingly, with campaigns dogged by the threat of relegation. The club flirted with the drop worryingly often and on two occasions, in 1994 and 1998, came within a whisker of being relegated to the second tier.
But unlike other occasions when struggle had given rise to success, the years that followed that decade would see no return to glory, Everton fell off the pace, surrendering the club s long-held position as part of the English game s footballing and financial elite. Why this transformation in the club s status occurred (and it was unquestionably a significant one) is a topic that has vexed Evertonians for decades.
Prior to the inauguration of the Premier League, Everton were one of the domestic game s big boys, a member of the self-proclaimed Big Five along with Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United and Spurs. These were the clubs that dictated the terms of the game and who ushered in the birth of the Premier League.
The Blues were there by right of the club s relative wealth and because Everton were so good. Nine First Division titles, a record-breaking number of seasons in the top flight, four FA Cups; by that point the men from Goodison boasted a record that left modern giants such as Chelsea and Manchester City looking like minnows by comparison.
But all that changed. Although David Moyes banished the spectre of relegation that haunted the 1990s and a decade of stability p