In his weekly Royal Blue column, our Everton correspondent Joe Thomas looks ahead to the visit of Tottenham Hotspur with excitement as he reflects on what this game meant to the club last season
Joe Thomas is the Everton FC correspondent for the Liverpool ECHO. He follows the Blues home and away, providing match reports, analysis and insight into events at Goodison Park, Finch Farm and beyond. Joe spent more than a decade covering news on Merseyside, working on award-winning investigations and extensively covering matters related to the Hillsborough tragedy - including the recent criminal prosecutions. Always grateful for tips and feedback, he can be contacted at joe.thomas@reachplc.com and on Twitter via @joe_thomas18
David Moyes before the Premier League match between Manchester City and Everton at Etihad Stadium. Photo by Visionhaus/Getty Images
David Moyes before the Premier League match between Manchester City and Everton at Etihad Stadium. Photo by Visionhaus/Getty Images
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Tottenham Hotspur was the beginning of the change, in my opinion. By the time Ange Postecoglou’s side visited Goodison Park in mid-January, Everton had already started to become a different club.
The Friedkin Group had completed their takeover just weeks earlier. What we now know as Hill Dickinson Stadium was handed over to them days later.
And David Moyes had returned to steward the club through another period of turbulence. The mission was to ensure survival but the Scot set his heights higher than that and quickly set about taking the Blues up the table.
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That began with Spurs. His first game was not the fairytale under the lights we hoped for as Aston Villa snuck away from L4 with a narrow 1-0 win but the following weekend it felt like players and supporters had had the time to warm up for the second era of Moyes.
It was some performance. The frailties of the Everton he had inherited threatened to ruin the occasion later in the game but neither anxiety nor former Gwladys Street favourite Richarlison could find a third goal and Moyes won his second ‘first three points of a reign’ in Royal Blue.
Goodison genuinely felt different that day. It is easy to forget there were doubts about whether Moyes was the right man for the job, concerns he was aware existed within portions of the fanbase. But there was also a sense the fresh impetus behind the scenes needed new energy in the dugout.
Sean Dyche had led the Blues to stubborn, impressive points against Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City in the previous month and had the backing of TFG.
Yet the miserable defeats to Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth either side of the new year were more evidence of what had become apparent through the course of the campaign - that for all his respectable work to keep Everton in the Premier League the previous two seasons, he was not capable of taking that club beyond survival scraps and his inability to do so made another one increasingly likely.
Moyes answered the significant questions over whether he could fare better almost immediately and that Tottenham game was the first blow landed on his detractors.
In his first press conferences he had changed the mood around the place. Dyche complained of supporters demanding the Blues qualify for Europe last year - claims I did not hear once from sensible voices. Moyes came in and said survival had to be the focus but insisted Europe, in time, was not a dream but an expectation.
Goodison was bursting with fresh energy and the players fed from it. Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Iliman Ndiaye scored clever, skillful goals.
At 2-0 with half-time seconds away, Everton went for the third they needed to ensure they could land all three points - and they got it. It was another contrast from the previous months of Dyche, a period in which the side had repeatedly squandered two-goal leads.
Jake O’Brien was brought in from the cold at right back and Goodison, which had witnessed too many sorry displays in her final year already, had an afternoon befitting of her last campaign hosting the senior men’s side.
A lot of hard work needed to follow that 3-2 win, but so much of it was achievable because of it, and the manner in which it was obtained.
Fast-forward nine months and so much of what has been achieved on the pitch can be traced back to that day - O’Brien is not the answer at right-back but he has made an impressive adjustment to that role and was crucial to the second half of the last campaign; Ndiaye scored again the following week at Brighton and it does feel as though Moyes’ arrival allowed him to come out of his shell at Everton.
More than anything, that connection between the dressing room and the stands feels more alive and there is a sense everyone is moving forward together.
There have been, and will continue to be, teething problems of course. And it is a great shame that Jarrad Branthwaite is unavailable for this match. It was Spurs, fresh from Champions League qualification, whose interest was most pronounced in the summer and this would have been a fitting fixture for the centre-back’s first game back - a feat that felt probable when Moyes spoke to the media ahead of the trip to Manchester City.
Branthwaite was being earmarked for a return but the hamstring setback has put paid to that for the moment.
Even in that, the signs of a change at the club are visible. When key players suffered injuries or setbacks across recent years it often felt the end of the world.
Branthwaite’s complication is bad news but Michael Keane has been an able deputy and the Blues will hope to continue to make progress while he recovers from the successful surgery he had on Tuesday.
Looking ahead to Sunday’s game, this feels like a pretty good opportunity to assess where this Everton side is right now. Tottenham are loaded with talent and now have the brilliant Thomas Frank in charge.
But they have their frailties and this is not a game the Blues should fear. The return of Jack Grealish will no doubt help.
More than anything, it is nice to spend a week looking forward to a game like this - a process that, for me at least, started with this fixture last season.
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