Unleash the Dogs of War again.
The battle lines have now been drawn between the Blues and the Premier League following the immediate 10 point reduction and now comes the call to arms.
Loyal but long-suffering Evertonians are no strangers to adversity but when the chips are down and they’ve seemingly been backed into a corner, this is when they can be at their most effective. In the wake of the independent commission’s verdict, a statistic was shared online that stated there was only one team who had avoided relegation from the Premier League when having four points or fewer from their first dozen matches…
READ MORE: Inside the Premier League's case against Everton and angry club's response to 'double standards'
READ MORE: Everton's points deduction feels totally wrong - and commission's own reasons explain why
That was Everton in 1994/95, when Joe Royle came in, got his side off to a flier at a turbocharged Goodison Park by defeating Liverpool 2-0 and christened his battlers “The Dogs of War.” He also steered the team to FA Cup glory at Wembley, defeating Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United in the final for what remains the club’s last major honour.
Nobody can turn the clock back to those days but the ‘Spirit of the Blues’ from that era can now be rekindled, and to a certain degree has already been fostered this season so far under Sean Dyche even before this major setback arrived. Such a severe punishment might well have proven a death sentence to Everton in recent campaigns but this term there is a genuine belief that they can still survive in spite of the penalty.
To be dropped to four points after 12 matches would usually have left a club marooned at the bottom but even before the Blues start their appeal – Sheffield Wednesday had their 12-point deduction for breaching profitability and sustainability rules halved to six by an independent League arbitration panel in 2020/21 – they are still just a couple of points behind Luton Town and a place outside the drop zone.
Everton might have maddeningly failed to overturn the Hatters’ lead over them in 45 second half minutes during their head-to-head at Goodison Park back on September 30 when they lost 2-1 but they’ve kicked on since those early home defeats that Dyche described as “unfathomable” and surely we’d all back them to overhaul a two-point deficit on Luton Town and one-point deficit on Sheffield United over the next 26 matches. After the relegation near-misses of the past couple of seasons, the green shoots of recovery – on the field at least – have been demonstrated by Dyche’s men.
Just a week ago in their most-recent game, a 3-2 triumph over Crystal Palace gave Everton a third successive league win in London for only the second time in over a century of trying. Before the deduction, they were just two points shy of Chelsea and a place in the top half of the table and only goal difference kept them off being third in the away table.
That increased resoluteness on the road – the Blues have already won more away matches this term than they did in either of the two previous seasons – will serve them in good stead. After the dramatic victory at Selhurst Park, Dyche said: “There’s real talent, I’m convinced of that and I’ve seen it but what about when it’s not your day, the hard yards and the ugly stuff, that’s the questions that have been asked of Everton over the past couple of seasons.” The team’s form at Goodison has been less emphatic but finally seems to be moving in the right direction and nobody will be in any doubt over the bubbling cauldron of an atmosphere that will be generated when Manchester United arrive for Everton’s next fixture on Sunday November 26.
Even the Red Devils’ aforementioned legendary manager Ferguson – the most-successful boss in British football history – admitted that trips to Goodison were always “a nightmare” for his sides, and Blues fans will have their hackles up for this latest visit in a manner that even a full-blooded tackle by Phil Neville on Cristiano Ronaldo wouldn’t come close to replicating. Evertonians might refer to their beloved home since 1892 as “The Grand Old Lady” but we all know hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Goodison isn’t some sweet old dear sat in her rocking chair and ready to hand you an Everton mint from her handbag, especially now. She’ll be a tough, snarling battle-axe, prepared to batter opponents into submission with forceful blows from her umbrella.
Whether it’s sympathy over the severity of the punishment through to sneering approval from rivals, the rest of the football world is having its say on the Blues right now but only Evertonians – who have already been dragged through the mud so much – know how it feels. It’s an ‘us against the world’ feeling of defiance and for all the managerial churn the club has been subjected to under Farhad Moshiri, another saving grace, along with what looks like a lack of quality at the bottom end of the table this season, must be that it’s Dyche who is in charge at this moment when the music stopped.
Like Howard Kendall (Blackburn Rovers); Royle (Oldham Athletic) and David Moyes (Preston North End), some of Everton’s best managers, the 52-year-old arrived at the club having previously learned his trade at a smaller Lancashire outfit and he knows the territory when it comes to what Merseyside fans’ expectations are on this side of Stanley Park. Out of all the bosses appointed by the current regime – including the great Carlo Ancelotti, who was better-suited to massaging the giant egos of galacticos – Dyche is arguably the most natural fit for the Blues and while he proclaimed himself to be a ‘Marmite manager’ when appointed in terms of his personality dividing opinion, in the eyes of this correspondent, he was already the ideal incumbent for the post before this decision and now even more so.
There is a prevailing sense of injustice among Evertonians – the people who are really being penalised here along with the players – in terms of what has happened. Everton have been operating at the elite level of the English game since the start having been founder members of the Football League in 1888 before any of the so-called ‘Big Six’ – those half dozen clubs who Blues chiefs spoke up against when they tried to join a breakaway European Super League but went unpunished – were even involved.
Throughout the prevailing 135 years since Everton first joined football’s pioneers, this is the biggest points deduction ever dished out. For all of the others, you could at least see or understand what had happened in some kind of tangible sense.
A mass brawl on the pitch at Old Trafford on October 20, 1990, resulted in Manchester United being deducted one point and Arsenal two. A century before that, Sunderland were docked a couple of points for fielding an unregistered player.
In January 1997, Middlesbrough received a three-point deduction for failing to turn up for a game against Blackburn Rovers the previous month because they claimed 23 players were unavailable through injury or illness but failed to provide proof. Then in March 2010, Portsmouth received what was – until now – the heaviest ever penalty when they had nine points taken away for entering administration.
As the Mayor of Greater Manchester and lifelong Blue Andy Burnham tweeted: “Premier League sanction for going into administration: 9 points. Premier League sanction for a technical breach of the rules when building a new stadium in the midst of a pandemic/conflict: 10 points. How is this fair?”
This dispute has been so opaque that while legions have strong feelings over it, how many of us truly have a grasp over what really went on? My colleague Joe Thomas provides the best explainer I’ve seen so far in his piece which he points out that the case against Everton ultimately amounted to a dispute over £19.5million but just how do the thousands of Evertonian parents explain to their children why after the team’s recent upturn in results, the team now suddenly find themselves joint bottom of the Premier League table?
The case refers to 2021/22 so other than Burnley, who could have stayed up had a 10-point deduction been enforced that season, but are now back in the Premier League and level on points with Everton, nobody else can have any real claim to have been potentially hard done by. After their previous profligacy under Moshiri – with the now wantaway majority shareholder having admitted in the summer of 2022 “we have not always spent large amounts of money wisely” and Financial Fair Play restrictions biting – the Blues had already drawn in their horns when it came to transfer outlays.
It wasn’t as if they were using funds on any kind of major on-the-field investment unlike Manchester City who have yet to be dealt with on their 115 FFP charges over a nine-year period that saw them lift more silverware than the entire preceding century of football. We can only look forwards and now is the time for Everton – both on and off the pitch – to show their teeth and bite back.
