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James Lawton: Moyes stirs memories of Shankly in assault on Liverpool's empire

The Scot who is rebuilding Everton believes that if you happen to be a football manager it is a job without limits on your body and soul

Tuesday 19 November 2002 01:00 GMT
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The swift, almost instant glory of David Moyes at Everton must, unavoidably, be set against the agony of Terry Venables and even to some extent the difficulties of such senior statesman as Sir Alex Ferguson and Gérard Houllier.

Perhaps it also needs to be said that Moyes, like Peter Reid at Sunderland a few years ago, is already drawing up the terms of an ambush or two of his own down the road. We know, certainly, how quickly gratitude turns to unreasonable expectation on a football terrace – and in a boardroom.

This, though, is a matter for the future and the real point of Moyes' remarkable ascent at Goodison Park is the classic foundation on which it has been achieved. He does not spout tactics. While he is not a rent-a-quote, he says what he believes to be important and of all the beliefs he brings to what is clearly a quite extraordinary commitment of time and thought to the job he faces, it is already possible to identify the most valuable. It is his insistence on the need for personal responsibility, both his own and that of everyone attached to the football club.

This should post an immediate warning to Everton's impassioned chairman, Bill Kenwright, and directors who presumably are still at the stage of pinching themselves when they contemplate the Premiership table. They had better get their hands on the £5m it will take to cement their new manager's brilliant acquisition on loan of the Nigerian centre-back Joseph Yobo. Moyes has made a little go an extraordinary way already, but in the end he would be the first to say that ultimately there is no substitute for players of the highest quality. Moyes has already made a stunning impact. He has delivered beyond anyone's dreams. Now he needs the kind of back-up which the Everton board, in its various forms, has consistently failed to produce since the decline of Howard Kendall's empire.

His achievement is the one which Venables, and to a less dramatic but still significant level, Ferguson and Houllier are currently finding desperately elusive. It is to maximise utterly his resources. The evidence of how he has done it is already being generously stockpiled.

First, he issued a general philosophical statement which went straight to the heart of all that angst which has been building so relentlessly around the instinctive feeling that big-time football is generally in the hands of a generation of players who expect too much from the world and too little from themselves.

Said the big young man: "I want players to come here and give it everything they have. I want young, hungry players who want to improve themselves. I don't want fat cats who don't want to succeed and are happy as they are. This is a hard job and a lot of good managers have been here and had difficulties. It is a job that can never be easy, but if the right attitudes are not at work it is impossible."

Venables, more than anyone, would say amen to that, but knowing what is right and wrong about a football club is not always the same as being able to remake it quickly. Venables is in the horrors at the moment, the defeat by Bolton a savage blow after some signs of stirring, but given the psychology he inherited at Elland Road, the devastation caused by the trials of Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate, the sense of horizons disappearing under an ocean of red ink, any quick submission to the will of a notoriously fickle element at Elland Road would be quite outrageous.

Moyes, no doubt, is honest enough to be accept that in some ways his position is much less complicated than that of his more famous rival at Leeds. Any illusions of professionalism which had been entertained in the Everton dressing- room had surely been dispersed by the time the knowledgeable and experienced Walter Smith had been driven out of office. However, the sense that Everton were around rock bottom when Moyes arrived is a faint advantage indeed to set against the sheer scale of his achievement.

Whatever the extent of his success over the next few months, he has already reminded us of some of the basic qualities of a great manager. He acted firmly against any hint of indiscipline on the field. When Duncan Ferguson was sent off the fifth time – the highest number for any Everton player – in the first weeks of Moyes' regime, the new manager wasn't looking the other way. He fined him to the maximum possible level and delivered a ferocious lecture on the standards of behaviour that would now be demanded. A sheepish Ferguson admitted: "He came down on me like a ton of bricks." On several occasions, signs of petulance from players hauled off the field after inadequate performances have brought fierce reaction from the man making the decisions about those not meeting expected levels of effort.

Amid all of this is an almost exquisite irony that has to be absorbed by the currently troubled legions of Anfield. One of Moyes' first declarations at Goodison was that henceforth Everton would be known as the People's Club. Short of stepping on to the balcony of Liverpool City Hall, as Bill Shankly once did with such fervour that he said he felt a little of the power of Chairman Mao, the new man in town could scarcely have made a more daring raid on the passions of Everton's greatest rivals.

It just happens that to meet Moyes for the first time is to be reminded of Shankly. It is quite a subtle reminder, to be sure. As yet Moyes has not, certainly in my company, clambered on to a desk beneath the main stand, clapped his hands together, and said that his team were going to go off like a great bloody bomb in the sky. He hasn't assailed visiting scouts with the news that the reserves had just battered some shell-shocked opponents 6-0. He hasn't dragged his wife, Pam, to an Accrington Stanley game to celebrate an anniversary, as Shankly did his beloved Nessie. He hasn't publicly declared his conclusion that if natural intelligence could be consistently applied to the football field Malcolm Muggeridge might have played centre-forward for England. But Moyes does have a glint in his eye. He does work all hours. He does believe that if you happen to be a football manager it is a job without limits on your body and your soul.

Moyes, it is impossible not to be convinced, has the wild Shankly thing beneath an impressive understanding of the realities of the game. One of the most practised Shankly watchers, the former Anfield chief executive Peter Robinson, was mesmerised the day the great man waved his handkerchief at the adoring throng in front of City Hall. "My God," said Robinson, "it was something to see. He could have done anything with that crowd. He could have sent them down the Tunnel and they would have taken Birkenhead inside half an hour."

Moyes is specific about the place he wants to besiege. It is the old empire of Shankly across Stanley Park. These are early days, of course, but Anfield surely cannot be deaf to the sound of seriously marching feet. Everton have a young god in Wayne Rooney, but more importantly they also have an authentic messiah, and no one should be more alert than Liverpool Football Club as to what this might just mean.

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