You’ve adopted your beloved Everton Football Club and deluded yourself you can do what the combined expertise of David Moyes and Roberto Martínez could not by taking them to either domestic or European glory.
THE CATCH: Everton are incredibly mediocre, Phil Neville is still your captain, and under the current regime you have a transfer budget of £0.00. Get sharpening your knife, you’re about to enter a gunfight…
Previously: FM11/12 Skipping to the Good Bit at EFC (Intro), FM11/12: June 2011 (Pre-Season)
So that’s our first win out the way, even if it was against our own reserve team. Most of these players are likely to be farmed out to Grimsby or Bury or some other League 1/2 clunkers within the year, but I’ll take what I can get in these early stages.
I set up some serious scouting in order to pad out the squad and improve our chances over the course of a gruelling, transitional season. It turns out I cannot even trust my own scouting team to sift through the mire effectively. One of them, Thomas Hengen, has had a look around the country and has the nerve to suggest that Nigel Reo-Coker may be a valuable addition to the squad.
This leads me to believe he may be a Liverpool spy looking to undermine the club from within. I banish him to his native Germany instead where he might be more useful (I’d terminate his contract for such an appalling transgression, but I haven’t the money. Besides, much like a wasp: he’s far easier to just ignore in the hope he’ll eventually go away on his own). He is immediately replaced by the fantastically named ‘Yves Eigenrauch’: who is an upgrade insofar as I think he might be trusted to actually go scouting in real life rather than reading transfer gossip in The Mirror.
In the meantime – I’ve been trying to scour the loan market for someone who can improve the team and cost us sweet eff all.
United want rid and we need a quality striker – our loan bid is immediately accepted. However Fulham have also had their loan bid accepted, so nothing’s written in stone yet. Over to you Daniel.
Just in case, we also up our bid for Vaclav Kadlec – mainly out of pride. I’m not being upstaged by Porto, with their league-champions status and their CL football and that. We won an FA Cup seventeen years ago Vaclav. Have Porto ever won the FA Cup? HAVE THEY BALLS.
Well that worked. I actually played hardball over his contract, but maybe the glitz and glamour of northern Portugal was all too much for a boy of much more modest stock. He wants to come, Prague want to sell, but of course we haven’t generated any actual money yet. I delay the transfer and pray the Czech lads don’t get impatient.
This leads us up to our first ‘proper’ friendly – against our Chilean cousins Everton De Viña Del Mar. We stick with the 5-3-2 because I want the players to become familiar with what is a slightly weird formation, and I’d also like to make sure that we have at least two strikers on the pitch so as to boost their match fitness. People say you can’t polish a turd, but by the time the season starts I can guarantee that Denis Stracqualursi will be gleaming. We do however push Tim Cahill forward a little, as we struggled at times to link up the attack and midfield in our game against the reserves.
Everton 2 – 0 Everton De Viña Del Mar
That was fine, really. The start is tense and rusty. ‘Other Everton’ aren’t really all that bless ’em, but we make hard work of getting through their defence – with most of our attacks getting bogged down in midfield. A switch to direct passing and focusing our attacks down the left about half an hour in sees the ball immediately go to Leighton Baines, who promptly twats one in from 30 yards.
A flurry of subs go on for the second half, most notably Drenthe and Osman who replace Cahill and Baines. Those two combine with Jose Baxter (on for the completely anonymous Anichebe) to bypass Other Everton’s midfield, with Drenthe providing a beautiful cross for Jelavic to finish first-time (of course) at the back post.
Rather than going hell for leather at a team we should beat comfortably regardless, I decide to see how we do when looking to close down a game. We switch to our back up tactic of 4-2-3-1, and manage (pleasingly) to see out the game without incident.
Until the 88th minute, when Marouane Fellaini goes down injured.
It’s a broken toe, meaning our best midfielder will miss a crucial pre-season as well as the first month of Premier League fixtures. Great.
No rest for the wicked however, as we zip up to Lancashire to face Preston two days later, for our first game versus another team that isn’t also called Everton.
We 5-3-2 it up and go again.
Everton 2 – 1 Preston North End
We make widespread changes to give everyone a chance to build up match fitness and get used to the formation. We even give the Axis of Awful™ a run out to see what they can do against Championship opposition.
They cannot score as it happens. But they do a good job of occupying Preston’s centre-backs in Morgan and McLean, forcing them apart and creating space for Leon Osman to run into. Osman tests Stuckmann regularly, but he’s largely equal to it. After a few tame efforts, Drenthe fires a shot that the Preston keeper can only parry away, and Osman’s there to finally get his just rewards by nonchalantly slotting into an empty net.
Not long after, Darron Gibson (who has impressed in these early fixtures) sends a hanging corner directly onto the wise old head of Sylvain Distin. The ball cannons off the crossbar but Jelavic does what Jelavic does best and pounces to drill the ball into the bottom corner before Stuckmann can react.
Just as I’m starting to warm to Drenthe, he picks up a needless second booking by allowing Jamie Proctor to turn him inside out, before chaotically scything the Preston man down. I’m dismayed by the lad, he winds me up at the best of times – but despite being possessed by the ghost of Billy Bremner, I feel that with an arm round his virtual shoulder he could well be a useful player.
I let him sit next to me in the big boy chair in Preston’s away dugout, mainly to wind up Steve Round.
There’s now a gaping hole in our left-hand side. I quickly shift to our 4-2-3-1, sacrificing Jack Rodwell to bring on Leighton Baines and playing with Darron Gibson alone at the base of midfield.
Baines has barely crossed the touchline before Preston complete a move that would embarrass Guardiola’s Barcelona, pulling our weakened defensive line apart with a web of mazy passing that results in substitute Neil Mellor (formerly or our friends across the park) scoring a ridiculous chipped goal from the right corner of the penalty area, leaving Jan Mucha stranded.
Despite this flash of brilliance, the game peters out slowly as our defensive formation settles. This is solid, but not great, even with 10 men. Plus we’re still yet to play anyone of the quality we’ll expect to face in the league. I’m mildly concerned, and I say so in the post-match team-talk. Nobody cares. Except Leon Osman, whose morale suddenly shoots up to ‘Superb’. I have absolutely no idea what this means.
A day later, we sign our first new player! Although central midfield isn’t really a priority; the mononymous ‘Bressan’ can also play wide right, is only 22, and has some pretty solid stats with potential to improve even further. Also he may be the world’s only half-Belarusian, half-Brazilian – which makes him all the more unique. All this and he was only £1m from BATE Borisov, a team that gave the real-life Everton a bit of a scare in the UEFA cup back in the day.
However, this means we’re got even less money than the £0 we originally had. And we still need to somehow reimburse Sparta Prague for Kadlec. It’s clear someone significant needs to go to the chopping block for this to work…
And it’s our first-team keeper who pays the iron price. Ta-ra T-How. I’m amazed I managed to get £8.25m for a 32 year-old man prides that himself more highly on the amount of star-jumps he can do than his clean sheet record. Enjoy St. Petersburg Timmy lad.
I’m not too bothered – Jan Mucha is only slightly worse and we’re better off strengthening higher up the pitch. Maybe we can even steal a better keeper for less. Saddle Yves Eigenrauch! We’re going shopping!
I make bids for: Allan McGregor, Andriy Pyatov, Jaroslav Drobny, Steve Mandanda, Sebastian Frey, Samir Handanovic, Guillermo Ochoa, David Ospina, Marc Andre Ter-Stegen, Diego Benaglio, Tim Krul, Diego Cavalieri, Marco Amelia and Bernd Leno and every single one of them fails unreservedly. I head back to Finch Farm and try and get excited by Jan Mucha’s baldy head again. I really hope I don’t end up regretting this.
Maybe he can inspire some hope in our next fixture: a soirée to the English Riviera for a game against Torquay.
Everton 2 – 0 Torquay United
Even with a rotated team that was pretty poor. It all started as planned, with another first minute Jelavic goal, capitalising on some distinctly League 2 defending from the hosts. They then go down to 10 men around the 10 minute mark and I really wish they hadn’t.
Drenthe knocks in a tidy finish from a fantastic Darron Gibson long-ball (he’s played well in every friendly so far) after half an hour, I opt to go for the jugular and switch to attacking, rather than flipping the switch to 4-2-3-1 as before, I’m expecting us to tear little Torquay apart.
The hour that follows offers absolutely nothing. I do not want to be held at bay by 10-man Torquay United. I really really don’t. New signing Bressan is replaced by Tim Cahill at half time, who has done nothing in these first few games. On current form, along with the signing of Bressan and the consistency of Darron Gibson I doubt we’ll be seeing the Aussie in our starting line-up come August. The only occurrence of note is that now Sylvain Distin is injured – meaning that we’ll probably have to switch to a back 4 from now on. This is for the best. Our next most competent defender is Shane Duffy and I’m not entirely convinced he knows how to tie his own shoelaces.
I inform the team after the game that a 2-0 win against a 10-man league two side is a bit disappointing and they absolutely flip their shit.
I knew Royston was likely to be a handful, but I thought we’d made friends in Preston. Instead his incredibly thin skin leads him to decide that mild criticism of a whole Premier League squad is an unwarranted personal attack designed to force him out of the club.
These things are sent to try us. I ruffle his hair and reassure him it was nothing personal (I’d like to just fine the little tyke for being obnoxious but as its stands he’s on his last warning. Besides if Baines gets injured I really need him on-side).
/sigh
In happier news, look who’s finally arrived!
#WelcomeVaclav and all that. All that pissing around with delaying transfers and scraping for pennies has all turned out to be worth it. Now, if he learns at the knee of Jelavic for a year or so, and we spend a while on his individual coaching – we may have a superstar on our hands. And we binned Tim Howard in the process. A victory if ever there was one.
This is especially useful as Danny Welbeck decides he’d sooner rot in the reserves than be seen dead in either an Everton or a Fulham shirt. Good luck getting in a side with Javier Hernandez, Dimitar Berbatov and Wayne Rooney pal. SEE HOW I CARE.
Anyway. So far we’ve played teams a fair few notches in quality below us, so four wins is no less than I’d expect. Next up we have Espanyol, our first opposition of round about the same quality we’ll be expecting to encounter in the league.
Next time, let’s see if our brief foray into the transfer market has helped me ‘put a stamp’ on this squad. For better or worse…
Next Episode: July 2011 Part 2 (Pre-Season)
SEANFITZPADDY 