Chris Beesley reflects on the head-to-head between Everton manager David Moyes and predecessor Sean Dyche
There was no ghost of Christmas past haunting Everton when Sean Dyche returned to the Blues’ new home as the action on the pitch displayed a sharp contrast now that David Moyes has been back at the helm for almost a year.
Alan Stubbs, Everton’s captain when Moyes steered them to fourth in 2004/05, which is still the club’s highest Premier League position, admitted that he feared the Nottingham Forest fixture represented “a real potential banana skin” for the Blues.
Meanwhile, even the Everton manager felt during the 90 minutes itself that in many respects his side weren’t quite firing on all cylinders like they had been in recent weeks.
It was only when Moyes watched the game back this week – as part of his usual, meticulous attention to detail – that he was able to appreciate fuller the football feast that home fans had been treated to at Hill Dickinson Stadium.
When asked afterwards, Dyche described Everton’s 52,769-capacity base on the Mersey waterfront as “magnificent” but for him, it always felt like a Bullseye ‘look what you could have won’ that remained tantalisingly out of reach.
There was no grand entrance on the touchline for the new Forest boss as he quietly took his place, although even with his gruff exterior, one of football’s hard men looked genuinely touched by the warm round of applause he received from home supporters when making his way from the team bus to the main entrance.
As players, Moyes and Dyche both spent the bulk of their careers as centre-halves in the lower divisions of English football, but while they’ve also each had long previous managerial tenures at clubs, when you get to know them – or not as the case may be – they’re rather different characters.
While the son of Kettering was revered in East Lancashire - with a pub, called the Dyche Arms, being renamed in his honour after he guided Burnley to seventh in the Premier League in 2018, which was their highest position since 1974 and which brought European football to Turf Moor for the first time since 1966/67 - making new friends on Merseyside never seemed very high on his agenda.
He might have quipped that there were far more potential books to be written about his time with Everton than almost a decade of service with the Clarets, but for all his crisis management of a rudderless ship at Goodison Park, Dyche, perhaps knew in his heart of hearts that he was never going to be the figurehead for the Blues’ new dawn.
It’s Moyes though who has made that transition – far more than the mere two-mile geographical switch from Walton to Vauxhall – so seamlessly though, in a similar manner to the way he has successfully gone from being the Premier League’s youngest manager at 38 to the division’s elder statesman at 62, getting the best out of a whole new generation of players with a different outlook to those he first worked alongside, some of which were not much more younger than himself.
While he was an energetic firebrand when he started and that once red hair that Evertonians sang that they didn’t care about, has faded to white, a more mellow Moyes is a better all-round operator than those early days.
With a wealth of experience under his belt, both at home (only serial title winners Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger have taken charge of more Premier League games), and abroad from his stint in La Liga with Real Sociedad, Moyes is using that knowledge to build the Blues’ fortunes back up for a second time.
Although he was an accomplished manager while still in his 30s, many clubs who are now turning to the fashionable new breed of younger ‘head coaches’ are finding that while they might talk a good game, their skill-sets are still far from complete.
One of these more successful boy wonders in the dugouts, Fabian Hurzeler of Brighton & Hove Albion, was Moyes’ first victim as he posted the first of five away wins last season with a team that had triumphed just once on the road over the previous year – and that was at Ipswich Town, who had a brief spell in the Premier League after consecutive promotions.
The German, who is Moyes’ junior by almost three decades, was also sent packing with a 2-0 defeat in Everton’s historic first competitive match at Hill Dickinson Stadium while over the past month, there have been landmark successes at both Manchester United (where the Blues became the first team reduced to 10 men to ever triumph in the Premier League) and Bournemouth (where they picked up three points for the first time, a decade on from their first visit in the competition).
Stamford Bridge, where Everton go today, is the daddy of all their bogey grounds though.
While Moyes once enjoyed a penalty shoot-out success there against Chelsea in an FA Cup fourth-round replay in 2011, three points have not been collected by the visitors since Joe Royle’s first away game as manager on November 26, 1994, when eight of Everton’s starting 11 for the last match weren’t even born.
The Blues probably haven’t had a better opportunity to get another monkey off their backs, but even if it doesn’t happen this time around, with the team currently 12 points better off than they were after matchweek 15 last season – the biggest year-on-year increase – things are most certainly moving in the right direction under the old master, who knows what it takes to manage Everton better than anyone else in the game right now, and whose stewardship is a present that has already ensured it will be a Happy Christmas for Blues supporters, regardless of what happens in these next two fixtures before the big day.