Pressure game tests Smith's realism

'I never meet an Everton supporter. It's always a mad Everton supporter, a fanatical Everton supporter'

This is a significant week for the emotional well-being of Everton fans, as Walter Smith OBE is well aware. Sunday's goalless draw with a Leeds United team reduced to 10 men by half-time, compounded by subsequent results elsewhere, leaves the famous old club – still with more top division points than any other – contemplating their third relegation battle in the four years since Smith became manager.

The battle will intensify if Everton lose at West Ham this evening, and defeat by Middlesbrough in the sixth round of the FA Cup on Sunday will once again torpedo the perennial expectations enshrined in the club motto "Nil satis nisi optimum" (only the best will do).

Mediocre will do for Everton these days and, in the circumstances, Smith is entitled to look like a man barely on nodding terms with joie de vivre, a man for whom the word "dour" might have been invented. That is the image he usually presents to the world, although I have been assured that it is misleading, that Smith in private is engagingly genial, witty, sometimes downright gregarious.

I have come to Bellefield, Everton's training ground in the suburbs of Liverpool – adjacent to corporation playing fields which someone rather indelicately named after the late Bill Shankly, as if those on the Everton payroll need a daily reminder of the Shankly legacy – to find out. And, sure enough, as the players clatter in after training, Smith follows them wearing a broad smile. He pumps my hand, guides me to his office, offers me a sandwich, and insists on talking about me before we talk about him. I tell him that I am a diehard Evertonian. The smile broadens.

"So I've heard. I never meet an Everton supporter. It's always a mad Everton supporter, a fanatical Everton supporter. It's an amazing factor." Whatever, the club's followers fall broadly into two camps. There are those who think that Smith has underachieved, who think it is time he gave way to a younger, more dynamic manager, perhaps someone with an affinity for the club already, such as Peter Reid, or Dave Jones. And there are those who think he has worked wonders with inadequate resources just to keep Everton in the Premiership, who salute the fact that in the transfer market he, alone of all Premier League managers over the past four years, is marginally in credit.

I belong firmly to this latter camp. But I can see that his transfer policy, exemplified in the handsome but ageing shape of David Ginola, is make do and mend. My question is: How long can he go on working wonders? "You have to be realistic and say that relegation is a possibility," he says. "You have to face up to it, and that realism can help you. For instance, they say that 40 points is the safety zone, but it could be that 40 points won't be enough this season. I have never known so many teams who could still get involved [in a relegation struggle] if they have a bad run of results. Similarly, we only need a couple of wins to be pretty well placed. So we need a strong mentality. We mustn't panic.

"Football's difficult just now. There are pressures wherever you are. With the game becoming so financially based, Sir Alex is under massive pressure if Manchester United are fourth in the league. At Rangers [where Smith was manager for nine years, after four as assistant to Graeme Souness] I had to keep the team on top with no excuses. There is a more pleasurable pressure in trying to win than trying to avoid losing, but it is still pressure." None the less, the kind of pressure mounting on Smith this week is not, I venture, what he came into English football for. This time, a wry smile.

"It's not, no," he says.

As most Evertonians know, not to mention most Sheffield Wednesday fans, Smith was actually on the M6 heading down from Glasgow to talk to the Wednesday board about taking the manager's job there when his mobile phone trilled. It was Peter Johnson, then the chairman of Everton, sounding him out about a move to Goodison.

"I had Archie [Archie Knox, his assistant at Rangers and now at Everton] with me. When he left Man Utd to come to Rangers we'd met in a hotel in Carlisle, so we went back to the same place, had a cup of tea and a think about it. I came and met Peter Johnson, and I felt there was the wherewithal to start to achieve things again. My inclination told me to come here." His inclination let him down. "As it turned out, the money we spent wasn't really available," he says, dryly.

His inclination finally imploded in November 1998 when the chairman sold the club's talismanic centre-forward Duncan Ferguson to Newcastle United [now back again bringing his talismanic qualities to bear on the Everton rather than the Newcastle treatment room] without letting his manager know. It is said that even Mrs Smith knew about the deal before her husband, having heard about it on the telly.

"Maybe if he [Johnson] had known me a wee bit better, he'd have come to me and said this is what we have to do. It was an awkward situation for me. I'd brought in a number of lads, Dacourt, Materazzi, Collins, saying: 'This is where Everton are going'. So I couldn't walk away having persuaded others to join the club." Johnson made the situation a little less awkward by announcing his decision to sell up the morning after the Ferguson débâcle. All the same, the episode showed that Smith is incontestably a man of honour. Equally incontestably, he is a man without Dacourt, Materazzi and Collins, none of whom stayed for very much longer.

"That [the departure of good players] has been the most difficult factor. There has been no real continuity. We have been and still are patching up, hence Ginola, who I thought, after spending time in the wilderness, would want to show for probably his last few months in England what ability he has. But we have had to operate at the wrong end of the market, bringing in older players who obviously are not going to help the future. After four years I would like to have had a team in place, a chance of improvement.

"That's been the really disappointing thing, and I sense huge disappointment in the supporters, the directors, everybody."

All the same, Smith's triumphs in the transfer market should not be overlooked. In David Weir and Alan Stubbs, secured for less than a million pounds, Everton have one of the Premiership's most dependable defensive partnerships.

It is at the other end of the field that the team is floundering, whether Ferguson is fit or not. In fact, when the big man does venture on to the field, many observers feel that the team plays a one-dimensional game, pumping high balls towards him at every opportunity.

Smith denies this. "People exaggerate that. They see a striker who's 6ft 4in, and say the team just play it up. But I see a lot of teams just now with smaller strikers, who keep playing the ball over the top of the back four for them to run into corners. That to me is the same thing, done in a different manner. A lot of teams use the long ball. It's up to us to use it at the right times." Speculative hit-and-hope has too often been Everton's strategy off the field as well as on in recent years, but in Bill Kenwright, Everton's majority shareholder, Smith at least has a vice-chairman even more committed than he is to improving the cash-strapped club's prospects.

By wheeling and dealing in his uniquely charismatic way, Kenwright has secured a refinancing package, releasing transfer funds which have so far brought in two internationals, the Swede Tobias Linderoth and the Republic of Ireland midfielder Lee Carsley. Meanwhile, Smith has his old friend Alex Ferguson to thank for the arrival from Manchester United of the winger Jesper Blomqvist. "Alex called and said he'd had offers from one or two other clubs for Blomqvist. He felt he could still do a job, and was worth me taking a look at."

In what areas, I ask, silently wondering whether there is enough room on my tape, does the manager think the team still needs strengthening? "Midfield areas. Wider areas. A younger striker. We're not too bad off defensively, although we could do with one more utility defender having lost Abel Xavier, who could play centre-back or full-back."

Not only did Everton lose the Portuguese international, they lost him to Liverpool. Personally, I shed no tears about that. For his hairstyle alone I was pleased to see the back of him, which was slightly less offensive than the front of him. None the less, I ask Smith whether losing a player to Liverpool, as also happened in the case of Nick Barmby, disheartens him as it does the fans? "Having been at Rangers I certainly appreciate what it means to the supporters," he says. "But from a football point of view I would have been more annoyed if they'd joined a team closer to us in the league campaign.

"And maybe, if we were closer to Liverpool in the league table, they might not have gone. So we have to look at ourselves first and foremost." It is a good answer but, for all his introspection, even Smith must sometimes look enviously across Stanley Park. It must surely cause him a pang of frustration when he reads that Liverpool are considering bringing Patrick Kluivert from Barcelona, while he ponders whether he can gamble on buying Bobby Zamora from Brighton and Hove Albion?

"In my darkest moments that does frustrate me. But I have at least had the opportunity of doing all that, of nearly reaching a European Cup final, albeit in another country. On the other hand, that sometimes increases the frustration, because in games that are close I realise that we just need that extra bit of quality." What, then, of those who say that Everton need some extra quality in the manager's seat? Not so long ago it was rumoured in the press – albeit inaccurately – that the board had given Smith two games to safeguard his job.

"We had only won one league game in six, so if we had lost the next two, one of which would have been the FA Cup game at Stoke, you don't need a newspaper to tell a football manager that the situation is not good.

"There is no doubt that the next two or three years will be a very, very tough spell for Everton. But we've got be optimistic. I would hope that the King's Dock development will be the catalyst for Everton to get back where we should be, which is maybe not the top five just now, but certainly the top eight. And when that happens I would like to be here for the same reasons I came in the first place. There is still enormous potential here." It is good to hear Smith express a desire to manage Everton into a new stadium and a new era. Clearly, he has developed a huge affection for the club, even if his heart will forever belong to Rangers.

"I was a supporter as a boy, and fortunate enough to become manager. They were both successful times for the club, in fact just as you relate to the Everton team of the mid-80s, I relate to the Rangers team of the early 60s.

"You can never take that away. But Everton have the same depth of support. It sometimes causes me a fair amount of aggravation, but it is one of the things which will help the club retain its status in English football." It is time for Smith to see Sir Philip Carter, the chairman, on a "financial" matter. Yikes. He shakes my hand warmly, and I leave Bellefield, passing the Bill Shankly Playing Fields, with hope in my heart.