As Arne Slot looked forward to his first Merseyside derby, David Moyes looked back at some of his first 25.
He harked back to Lee Carsley’s winner in 2004, to the game Andy Johnson eviscerated Liverpool two years later. There was the day Luis Suarez scored and dived in front of Moyes, the Uruguayan’s riposte after the Scot had noted his propensity to go to ground. He recalled the time when, as he said, the refereeing was more lenient.
“When it was Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard it was just a question of who was going to kick who first,” he smiled. “I’ve got big memories of that.”
They were very different days to now, when Evertonians rejoice at their side’s surge away from the relegation zone. In other respects, too. As Moyes was the first to admit, he has had more than his share of derby defeats. But there were other forms of victory in a cross-city rivalry in his heyday.
“The last couple of years we did finish above them in the Premier League,” he said. He has returned after Everton regressed. “The gap between the two clubs now is probably as big as it has been for a long time and I need to start bridging it and bring the two clubs closer together,” he said.
It is 30 points or 14 places. Moyes has taken nine points from Everton’s last three matches. Liverpool, though, would go nine clear of Arsenal should they win on their final trip to Goodison Park.
Victory for Everton would have significance in various respects: Liverpool’s title challenge was finished off at Goodison last season while they enter the grand old ground’s last derby tied on 41 wins there apiece. Three points for Everton would take them above Manchester United and Tottenham. Others have fallen, too.
But Everton can judge themselves against their neighbours. “Unfortunately we are in a city that has got a very good other team, Liverpool, and we have to compete against them most of the time,” said Moyes. “Quite often they’ve spent more, been able to do so, and those things alone make it very difficult to be always competitive. Sometimes you can’t just say, ‘Oh here’s a derby with two teams going at it’. Sometimes you have to say one has got a much bigger budget and availability to buy more players than we have.
“I don’t think Evertonians want me to kid them on or tell them any lies. They’ve probably gone through the worst times they’ve felt as a club. The reason why I’m saying it to them is that we had to fight unbelievably hard for 11 years to get into a situation where we were more competitive against Liverpool. Year on year, we were getting more competitive. It took a long time to build that up. Now the gulf has come back. There was a gulf there when I first took over but I think at the moment it is back to that level again, if not further.
If Everton cannot outperform Liverpool over 38 matches, they task is to do so over 90 minutes. They did in April, Sean Dyche earning their first Goodison win in this fixture since Moyes in 2010. “It’s a one-off game, especially this one,” said Moyes. “There is a gulf between the teams in quality at the moment and obviously that is shown in the league position as well. That’s where you have to find a way to bridge the gulf on the night and bring it much closer.”
Goodison can be a factor. It often is when Everton prevail on such occasions. “We’ve got a derby game which has been going on for 130 years, all at Goodison or Anfield,” added Moyes. “It is incredible now that it is coming to an end at this stadium. But the stadium has played a big part in it building up to being a more explosive derby.”
A rearranged one, too. But for Storm Darragh, it would have taken place in December, before Moyes’ return. Slot’s preparations included rewatching Dyche’s April win. Now he has Johnny Heitinga, who played for Moyes’ Everton in that 2010 triumph and was among the Scot’s assistants at West Ham, on his backroom staff.
“Yes, he worked with David Moyes so, yes, he knows how he wants to play,” said Slot. “But I just watched the last three or four games, I can see the structure he had at West Ham and that he had before at [Manchester] United and West Ham and Everton. That is something very positive for a manager if you just look at his team, it doesn’t matter which shirts they wear and you just say, ‘ah, this is a David Moyes team’ or ‘this is a Pep Guardiola team’. That is a great accomplishment. You know what you get when you bring David Moyes in and that is mostly success.”
They constitute a mutual admiration society. “Most people would be amazed how well Arne Slot has done,” said Moyes, who encountered difficulties replacing a managerial legend at Old Trafford. Jurgen Klopp always seemed an admirer of Moyes, too, though the 61-year-old put his praise into context. “I didn’t really have any banter with him because, look, he was too good,” he said. “His teams were too good. It was hard to become pally with him when he was beating me all the time.”
Klopp became Liverpool’s first Champions League-winning manager since Rafa Benitez in 2005. And yet the Premier League table that season painted a different picture. Liverpool were fifth, Everton fourth. “It sounds like a big achievement and I feel it is a big achievement for this club to do that,” said Moyes. A repeat seems some way off but Moyes can be a romantic as well as a realist. “I am hoping that we can start building again,” he said. As Everton prepare to bid farewell to a stadium from the 19th century, it is all about the building.
