Forget Chelsea - next are games Moyes must win

And what about all those unsackable players lining up to say "it's our fault not his" or, indeed, the managerial award he received last Sunday, which is rapidly becoming the gaffer-torial equivalent of the postman phoning ahead to say the P45 is on its way? Moyes could be forgiven for speculating that a week which began with a silver salver could very well end with a gold watch, especially as defeat today is not so much a likelihood as an it-will-happen-a-hood.

Except, managers no longer get fired after losing against Chelsea, not even when they're at home, at the bottom of the League, on a seven-match losing streak, or even when they've spent £23m to take them from fourth to 20th in 10 months flat. Football can be cruel but it isn't downright psychopathic as Moyes acknowledged at the Bellefield training ground. "Nobody is giving us any chance whatsoever against them," he said. "Maybe that will help us. No pressure and all that. Put it this way, it would be a good one to win."

It will be the last of those for a while. After today the "good ones to win" become the "ones that must be won" and even the exhortations of the chairman, Bill Kenwright, will not alter that short statement's simplicity. But, boy, how Bill exhorts.

The theatre impresario's latest production is called A Man For All Seasons, a coincidence perhaps, but still an accurate summing-up of how the Everton overlord sees the man he stills refer to as "my little miracle". Any other chairman marching into the team hotel to deliver a rousing message of faith in his general, as Kenwright did before last weekend's defeat at Spurs, would be viewed ominously - but not at Everton.

"It was brilliant, admirable really," said the striker James Beattie. "He said he was really scared doing it and I'm sure Mr Kenwright has done some scary things in his time."

None so nearly as spine-tingling as what he might feel obliged to do if Everton reached Christmas in the same position. Forget Chelsea, the next four games are where this season is at - "Birmingham away, Middlesbrough home, West Brom away, Newcastle home". Will that merry lot ultimately read as the turning points or as the charge sheet? "Whatever happens will happen," Moyes said when asked to consider it. "But whatever happens I will still work in football."

The game would doubtless be glad to have him; the remarkable achievements of last season far outweighing whatever failures may or may not befall Everton this campaign. But even as Moyes made this point you could tell he did so in the grim knowledge that football operates in the here and now and only very rarely with hindsight. "It's that kind of game," agreed the 42-year-old. "But I think you need to look back. Everton have been in the Premiership for 13 years and finished in the top 10 three times. And twice that has been under David Moyes. So people have to decide whether they think that's good or bad."

At the moment, it's still "good" - but only just if the desperados of cyberspace are to be trusted. One internet poll asking "Should Moyes be sacked?" is currently running 60-40 and if that reveals doubts, then there must be. "Listen, we gave the supporters great hope by raising the mark and because of that they are rightly disappointed," he said. "My first season we nearly got into the Uefa Cup, but the squad weren't good enough to keep us there. So I had to dismantle, but without money there wasn't much we could do so the following season didn't go well. All we could do was get that unit together and become even stronger and we did that and finished fourth. But I knew if we kept exactly the same group, we wouldn't have finished fourth again. So that took some big changes and big decisions, too. And it might be that it takes us this year to get the whole wheel back in motion again."

He hasn't the time; it's some of his signings he needs in motion and quickly and not only Beattie, the £6m flop who may start today. There's Simon Davies and Nuno Valente, while Per Kroldrup and Andy van der Meyde have been injured since they arrived and remain a mystery. But the biggest, most perplexing, Merseyside mystery of all is why Moyes could not fix the glaring weakness - scoring.

First he beckoned Craig Bellamy, then Milan Baros, Robbie Keane, Mikael Forssell, Dirk Kuyt... they all said no, just as Michael Owen was always going to. "It's a long time since Everton were close to buying top players," offers Moyes, as his only positive. "We may not have got them but we came close and that's got to be an improvement."

The only chance Moyes seems to have of reaching his revised mission of "finishing in the top half" is to rediscover the togetherness of 2004-05, explain-ing why he took them to an outdoor adventure camp last week. It must have been refreshing for his players to be up a creek with a paddle for a change.

"Yeah, the mood of the players is great but talk's cheap," he said. "I can talk all day long but they have to do it in the game. I have not stopped telling them to get it into the box, to cross it or shoot. So what can we do? Make Chelsea's goal bigger, give them the five-a-side goal? No, we just have to remember that it was only a few months ago that we were three places behind Chelsea. The gulf wasn't too big then and it shouldn't be now. We have to get back to that level."

As he waits, and prays for them to do so, it is probably best Moyes doesn't take his wife to see Kenwright's play. The protagonist of A Man For All Seasons is Sir Thomas More, a good man, a revered man who is for so long the favourite of his leader. Yes, Sir Thomas ends up having his head cut off. King Henry VIII would have made a cracking Premiership chairman.