Everton arising — Terrace Edition

Words and supporting images: Tom Reed

Images: Ian Parker

Cover Image: Tom Reed

Everybody is kicking and screaming

Common casualties of over dreaming

Watch you floating on down from the ceiling

I think I just found something to believe in.

(Everybody’s Saying Thursday’s the Weekend)- DMA’S

“Shithouse”

“Ya firm of useless shithouses”

“Ya say we get on yous backs then you go and play like this?”

“Get out of our club ya money grabbing bastards”

“Shithouse”

There’s an Everton fan stood in the reflected grimness of Goodison Park, he’s not alone, just one of many commentating his feelings in a stream of consciousness outpouring at what is unfolding.

The smell of relegation bursts into the nostrils like the first plunging fork into a chicken and mushroom pie on the Goodison Road

His is a constant chatter throughout the game, knowing, unknowing, pleading, powerful, wanting something, anything, over and above a team that plays like a mid-table Championship side

He’d clapped along to the pre-match anthem “Spirit Of The Blues” that goes “Everton, we never shone so brightly” which, after about five minutes of this brand of footle-ball, seems like a sick joke for this low watt, energy saving lightbulb outfit that had generated those blinding, bayonet fitting bad boy teams from the 80’s

“What a touch” he shouts, the first compliment of the afternoon but it’s to a player in the Southampton red and white as James Ward-Prouse collects the ball with a Nike Air cushioned first touch before nonchalantly scooping the ball over his befuddled blue marker.

©Ian Parker/ Terrace Edition. Everton FC.

“Kick the rat into the stand’.

These are a hurting people, with Goodison going from patently the best ground in the country at kick-off to the worst at full-time, as the fans stage a sit-in protest and show those in charge that things really ain’t boss.

Southampton have taken the Michael in truth.

It was quite a risky tactic from the organisers to go for a post-match sit-in when plenty of fans are blatantly going to piss off into the piss soaked night to get started on the process of forgetting all this bollocks with wine and beer and a TV remote control too tightly gripped.

Yet, roughly half of Goodison stayed in place 10 minutes after the final whistle and unfurled banners trying to make sense of this football vertigo of emotions as high as photos of Toffee greats that tower up the grand old ground’s exterior.

It’s an ominous form of direct action, with grandads and grandmas, fathers, mothers and children doing little but simply remaining. There’s not much thrown on to the pitch and few blue pyros set off as they’ve all been popped at the pre-match coach greet, where the supporters geed up the players with more passion than they deserved.

At no point did Everton fans stop roaring on their lads and that’s the crux in this footballing daft wedge of Liverpool. You’d have forgiven the supporters for calling on defeat in the final 15 minutes, just to bring everything to a head after these years of unease but not a drop of it, they backed their side to the death.

The Ev-er-ton chant to the tune of “Here We Go” is quickly replaced with “sack the board” and when that process begins, it rarely ends up with the club hierarchy clinging on to their positions.

It seems the Everton directors had made a terrible mistake of not attending the match, reported in relation to a “threat” and in one fell swoop, reinforcing an us vs them dialectic.

“It’s been coming 25 years” sighs another weary Evertonian called Leigh, the football induced frown-lines on his face cutting in like the white lines that run the length of the pitch.

It takes an age to get light in Liverpool in January, the city bathed in an eery ink till nine AM and Everton’s soccer sadness has been a slow dawn.

You could go in to the ins and out of why Everton fans are quite so unhappy with their club but the banner which reads “A club with no structure, no vision or plans’ sums it up pretty well.

Two points stand out from what Leigh talks about, the first being that he feels more content with his trips to non-league away from Goodison, standing with a pint on the terrace and not having the sense of something pouring away.

Leigh was there at his first matches in the late 80s when Everton had the “last of it” but being a kid then, can barely remember those times.

The second is the worry of playing teams like Southampton and Brighton and knowing Everton could be humiliated. “Fucking Brighton” he laughs, ‘they were in the third division a few years ago”.

“We’re very good at making shit teams like Southampton look good”.

And there’s the hole in that Everton’s pie casing where all the steam escapes, because the Saints aren’t a bad side and set about the game like the home team should, with possession play, quick switches and a bit of that continental elan that the Goodison gang used to have a soft spot for.

It’s just that the gap between Everton and the likes of Southampton is more glaring than ever in football terms and that takes quite some getting your head around.

Everton certainly don’t have anyone like Ward-Prouse, a tiny fella with so much presence and potential power he’s like a WWF wrestling figure in football form.

Of course, Ward-Prouse curls in a nonchalant free-kick to seal a 1-2 comeback win, leaving a prostrate Pickford cemented to the earth like the foundations at the new Everton stadium going up at Bramley-Moore dock.

“Best ground in League One”, quips Leigh, hinting that the Everton board seem to palm off macro-level concerns via the supposed big deal of the new mega-stadium.

“Nice but this is a football club” he says, hitting the nail on the head with a bloody great swinging crane.

Some will say Everton has lost its soul. Yet that soul is very much alive with the fans, they just want their club back and where that is, between here, there and the dockside, no one fucking knows.