The deluge came earlier this week, with a bitterly appropriate sense of timing. As the precursor to the approaching Storm Darragh emptied its load over the north-west of England, video footage showed the stands and stairways of Everton’s new stadium cascading with rainwater, filling and flooding the concourses beneath.
Which – in an ideal world – is probably not the image you want people to conjure up when they think of your new £760m waterfront stadium, built on a floodplain, surrounded on three sides by the River Mersey and expected to withstand decades of climate change and devastating sea level rises.
Naturally Everton were quick to allay any alarm, insisting that the new stadium would boast an advanced “siphonic drainage” system designed to deal with heavy rainfall, but which has not yet been installed. Which certainly answered one question, while raising another. According to the club’s timescale, construction of the stadium is due to be completed “in the final weeks of 2024”.
Well, here we are. Might be a good time to get cracking on that siphonic drainage system.
The point here is not to poke fun at Everton’s new stadium, which should still be ready for the start of next season and from what we can already see looks – frankly – incredible. But it does at least offer a window into what it must be like following this club: a never-ending trial of calamities and setbacks, hitches and anxieties, every bright new horizon laced with a dark grey storm cloud. A multicoloured dreamscape that always seems to be getting closer, but which you can never quite touch.
In this respect, and for all the wistful nostalgia and warm tributes, Saturday’s Merseyside derby feels like something of a milestone. The last derby to take place at Goodison Park – barring a freak FA Cup draw or some unforeseen drainage mishap – is a moment not simply for commemoration but for celebration. Yes, things will never be the same again. But when you’re Everton in 2024, maybe that’s not the worst thing.
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Recent events have of course put a glossy spin on what for Everton fans has often been the most foreboding of fixtures. The 4-0 demolition of Wolves on Wednesday night pulled them clear of the relegation zone, reward for a cautiously promising autumn run in which Sean Dyche’s side have lost two out of 11 in all competitions. The Friedkin Group takeover should be done any moment now, ending a two-year saga that has been emotionally ruinous for all involved. Liverpool are top of the league but dropped points at Newcastle in midweek and have enjoyed a bare minimum of recovery time. This may not be the worst time to play them.
And so, finally, to church. Up Walton Road, or through the park, or out of the skinny terraced houses adorned with Christmas wreaths, down Gwladys Street for one last dance with the enemy. In many ways this is the perfect rivalry: a suffocating intimacy that so rarely spills over into genuine danger, an antipathy that so rarely feels like hatred, warring siblings rather than warring neighbours, a reminder that football has long been the most important of the unimportant things.
Of course, the days of the “friendly derby” are long gone, if they ever really existed outside of the imagination. For Liverpool’s players, Saturday’s will be a test not just of technique but of character and nerve, a wall of noise hitting them from all four sides, a reception as bracingly confrontational as any early slide tackle.
And if the Anfield derby has often carried an air of procession to it – Everton’s only win there in the 21st century came during Covid and without fans – then the Goodison derby is a different beast entirely, a genuine contest that has very often defied the form book. Howard Kendall’s glittering 1980s team won only one Goodison derby in eight attempts. Jürgen Klopp’s all-conquering Liverpool side won only twice in eight visits.
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Which makes the moments of triumph all the more cherished. Liverpool fans of a certain age still fondly remember the 5-0 win at Goodison in 1982, a counterattacking masterclass that gradually intensified into a merciless rampage. There was Dan Gosling’s delirious extra-time winner for Everton in a 2009 FA Cup replay. And Goodison can scarcely have been as loud as it was in April, when Dyche’s team buried Liverpool’s title chances with a rambunctious 2-0 victory.
But of course derby day Goodison is not the whole Goodison, a stadium that for all its quaint charm has also begun of late to feel a little like a haunted house, characterised by awkward silences and occasional outbursts of groaning. The football has been mediocre in style and standard. There have been exhausting battles with relegation, with the authorities, with owners present and prospective, with coaches present and past. Everyone, right now, is just a little bit ground down.
For the moment, Everton look safe. They play like a Dyche team, have spent like a Dyche team and will probably survive like a Dyche team: painfully, painstakingly, with a hard-working but limited squad that will soon need to be rebuilt with money that does not really exist. Dominic Calvert-Lewin will probably need a proper replacement soon. Jarrad Branthwaite may have to be sold if the offer is right. Fifteenth place should not be beyond them.
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The question is whether Everton can realistically or legitimately aspire to more than this. And perhaps the answer lies in the gleaming panels staring out across the Mersey from Bramley-Moore Dock, in the steep slopes of the huge new 13,000-seat South Stand. There is always another rainstorm coming. There will be stadium debt to service, vultures and auditors to be fought off. But right now, any future feels better than any present.
Saturday represents an end. But it also represents ambition, renewal, change: the novel sensation of going somewhere, for a club who have spent so long going nowhere.
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