DAVID MOYES was strolling through the departure lounge at John Lennon airport last week when his path was blocked by a group of Liverpool supporters preparing to head to Germany for their European Cup tie against Bayer Leverkusen. Inevitably, the banter started to fly, with the Everton manager insisting that he gave as good as he got. “They asked me what I was doing so I told them I was compiling a dossier on all the Champions League teams, ” he recalled, his tongue still lodged firmly in his cheek.
Moyes, it transpired, was flying not to Leverkusen but to London, where he would take in Arsenal’s match against Bayern Munich. Rather than a vain desire to be seen moving in the right circles, as has been known of some in the managerial fraternity, his interest was academic in the strictest sense, stemming from a desire to keep abreast of the latest tactical innovations and perhaps to pick up a hint or two from watching the game being played at what he calls the “top end of the tree”.
He is cautious about saying as much, but Moyes knows that he could be managing in the Champions League himself next season — and at the expense of a Liverpool side paired with Juventus in yesterday’s quarter-final draw. Such a feat, he says, would be “incredible — equivalent to Arsenal, Chelsea or Manchester United winning the Premier League. Maybe it would surpass that in many ways because those three would be everyone’s favourites to win the league, whereas I don’t suppose we would have been anyone’s favourites to finish fourth. Seventeenth or eighteenth, maybe . . .”
That last throwaway comment serves as a stark reminder of just how far Moyes and Everton have come. At Anfield tomorrow, they take on Liverpool in the knowledge that even a draw would consolidate their hold on the fourth Champions League spot, leaving them seven points clear of their rivals with eight games to play. It is easy to forget that they started the campaign among the favourites for relegation, in despondent mood after a gloomy summer dominated by bitter wrangles in the boardroom and the loss of Wayne Rooney to Manchester United.
“It was a horrible summer,” Moyes said, wiping his lips after polishing off a bowl of soup in his office at the club’s training ground. “I think it was one of the hardest times I’ve had in football. We had let a lot of players go and we were reading every day about other players joining other clubs. We were even reading that we might not have a club because of the financial situation. So every day was a struggle and I think it carried on until the last day of the transfer window because that’s when Wayne went.”
Is he saying that Rooney’s departure, having been drawn out for so long, was actually greeted with a sense of relief? “Not relief, no. We would rather we still had Wayne at the football club obviously, but it wasn’t to be and people move on,” Moyes said. “The day before we lost Wayne, we went to Old Trafford and drew 0-0 and got a lot of confidence from that. Maybe that was the day we got that confidence and maybe with, whoosh, he’s gone (he signals with his hand), we went on to the next day and we moved on.”
From there, he says, Everton “haven’t looked back”, but to appreciate what they have achieved this season, it is necessary to do just that. Rooney was one of 17 players who left the club last summer, with only two new signings of note (Tim Cahill and Marcus Bent). This would seem a recipe for disaster for any club, but, for Everton, who finished the previous campaign just one place above the relegation zone, it looked like suicide. They were many people ’s tip for relegation and Moyes was second-favourite behind Kevin Keegan to be the first Premiership manager to lose his job.
“It (relegation) was a word which probably wasn’t too far away from most people’s lips,” he said. “But the one thing about it which annoyed me was that none of the people who were saying: ‘Well they might get relegated, but I’ll tell you what, the manager there will do everything he can to stop that happening.’ I didn’t hear that and that’s because it was people who don’t know anything about me, don’t know my background, don’t know my upbringing, don’t know what drives me. But I do. I know where I’m going.”
He is reluctant to go into details (“that would make it sound like I’m talking about myself”), but his inner drive has been clear for all to see this season as he and his staff, to use his phrase, have “squeezed every last bit of juice” out of their players. Given their lack of genuine quality, their success can be hard to explain, but Moyes points to the number of points secured by late goals as evidence that his team have acquired something, be it physical or mental, that is driving them towards their unlikely goal.
Moyes accepts it is a compliment to his team that they are far more than the sum of their unglamorous parts, but, if this is the case, what does he make of Liverpool, whose Premiership campaign has been one of abject underachievement? “They’re a good team,” he said. “They’ve got some outstanding talent and they’ve managed to buy some outstanding talent, too. We’ve not been in the same marketplace as them. I think that’s something that gets forgotten. With the finances they’ve got, it shouldn’t be a level playing field, but it’s 11 against 11 and I don’t think there’s any club that has the togetherness that Everton have got. That’s something a lot of clubs strive to do, to get the best out of their players every week — and I believe we’re close to doing that.”
Whether that would be enough to flourish in the Champions League next season is open to question, but Moyes, who will have about £20 million to spend this summer, would dearly love to find out. “I’d love to take a team, this team, into Europe,” he said. “Not just to test myself, but because I think that Everton Football Club are ready for it again. And not because we’ve got great resources or a great stadium or because we’re ready to show the world everything that we have, but just because the Everton people haven’t had much to shout about for a long time. Hopefully, their time has come again.”
BENÍTEZ TURNS TO BOARD GAMES FOR INSPIRATION
RAFAEL BENÍTEZ has revealed little about himself since taking charge of Liverpool last summer, but slowly the Spaniard’s personality is emerging. In recent weeks he has admitted that pillow talk with his wife revolves around tactics; he has stumbled into an Irish bar in Cologne to make merry with hundreds of drunken Liverpool supporters on a European jaunt; and his latest improbable revelation is that the skills for his managerial career were developed playing military board games.
At a press conference this week Benítez was trying to explain how his attention to detail had led him to look for every possible explanation for the inconsistencies of his Liverpool team when he launched quite unexpectedly into a ten-minute rant about a board game, Stratego, which appears to have taken up an inordinate amount of his time growing up in Madrid.
“I used to play a military game when I was a child and I remember losing some games,” he said, “so I spent the whole night thinking about this game. I read the rulebooks so that I knew everything about the game. After that, I never lost.”
Benítez eventually explained how this related to football. “It’s important to have the right movements. If you want to win, you have to be calm. It’s good training.”
But then, he admitted, football is never so clear-cut. “Sometimes you do a perfect move and the goalkeeper saves. Sometimes you do a very good defensive game and then the opponents score a goal from nothing. Before the game at Newcastle, we talked about Laurent Robert and his free kicks and you try to control these things. But if he gets it right, what can you do?” Go home and cheer yourself up with a game of Stratego, it seems.
