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When it comes to dishing out the Manager of the Year gong come
season’s end, you’ll get pretty long odds on the winner
being anybody other than Jose Mourinho, the Chelsea chief who is
well on course for a domestic double and could even scoop a terrific
treble, culminating in back to back wins in the Champions League
with two different clubs.
Yep, it’s been a pretty decent twelve months for Senor Mourinho,
but then again, when you’ve got the footballing world’s
biggest bank account behind you do hold most of the cards. All Jose
has had to do is add more and more quality to the team and, as a
result, he looks set to inch Chelsea one place up the Premier League.
But how well would he have done if he’d taken the helm at a
side who were among the favourites for the drop?
If his pre-season planning had been overshadowed by the imminent
departure of Damien Duff? Or, with the season going very nicely
thank you very much, if he’d then lost Frank Lampard? Then
the scenario looks a little bit different doesn’t it, especially
if he’d been left to work with a squad which, by comparison
with Chelsea’s, is wafer thin anyway.
Which is why David Moyes has every right to wonder why his name
doesn’t come up in these current manager of the year discussions.
Since he left Preston three years ago, Moyes has slowly but surely
put his stamp on Goodison Park and has, along with Steve Bruce,
been that rarity of recent times, a manager who has served his apprenticeship
in the lower divisions but has proved himself able to step up to
the more stringent demands of life in the top flight.
Not that it’s always been plain sailing for Moyes because last
season was one long, dark night as the team that had flirted with
European qualification amid the first flush of Rooneymania suddenly
lost its way and tumbled down the division.
The national obsession with Rooney certainly can’t have helped,
but Moyes has been big enough to admit that the architect of Everton’s
downfall was, in no small part, Moyes himself.
Acting the sergeant major figure simply won’t wash with Premiership
footballers and Moyes has gone on record this season to concede
that he needed to lighten up, to allow his players to express themselves,
that he needed to treat them like men rather than expecting them
to behave like kids. Once he started to value the players and their
families again – wives and partners received flowers on the
day when the players returned for pre-season training for instance
– they started to find the unity and the form that had served
them so superbly two seasons ago.
If Moyes was forced to take a refresher course on his man management
skills, nobody would question his attributes as a shrewd judge of
footballing flesh, a good reader of the game or a terrific tactician
on and off the pitch. His heart must have sunk as Rooney made Euro
2004 his own, but he played the inevitable transfer tribulations
like a stringed instrument, bending it to his own benefit, lancing
the boil before the transfer window closed, ending a situation that
could only have had catastrophic consequences for Everton.
And with something to prove, that Everton were no one man team,
the players responded magnificently, coming back from a first day
footballing lesson at the hands of Arsenal to become one of those
sides that every opposition club least likes to face. More than
that, in January, they managed to cope with the departure of Thomas
Gravesen, the midfield enforcer who has consistently been among
the very best the Premiership has to offer.
Moyes has done well when it comes to buying policy, the arrival
of James Beattie to help out up front, snatched from under the noses
of Aston Villa, made it clear that Everton are thinking big again,
while Mikel Arteta could prove a yet more significant piece of business.
Nobody would have given Everton a hope of achieving a Champions
League placing when we kicked off back in August, but that prize
is almost within their grasp. Moyes looks ready to steer Everton
to fourth place and to build on that success in the coming seasons.
Achieving the apparently unachievable. Now that’s a proper
criteria for manager of the season.
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