There is an old joke, one that I will probably wrongly attribute to John Bishop, about what marks Liverpool out as unique, among all the great cities of the north. Ask someone in Leeds or Manchester, the set-up goes, what it is like to live in their hometown, and they will begrudgingly grumble something about it being ‘fine’.
Put the same question to someone in Liverpool – a place that has rather more in common with its near-ish neighbours than anyone ever wants to admit – and they will, according to the punchline, readily and with absolute conviction declare it to be the greatest city in the world.
This joke is, of course, wrong. As anyone who has ever met one will know, Mancunians are also habitual braggarts. The actual exception – even if Newcastle and maybe Sheffield are included – is Leeds. That is the only place in the north where boasting about the wonders of home would be considered beyond gauche.
Regardless, I’ve found myself thinking about that joke more often than anticipated over the last few weeks, whenever I have had cause to glance at a Premier League table that contains Everton in the thick of the race for a place in the Champions League.
This is not, in one sense, particularly unusual. We are, now, more than a quarter of a way into the season. The table is beginning to shake itself out, the campaign to come starting to take on the vague outline of a definable form: Arsenal as champions-in-waiting, a clutch of teams in contention for Europe, seven or eight sides down at the bottom, sweat already gathering on their brows.
It is still early enough, though, that there should be an outsider – at least one, maybe – keeping pace with those teams scrambling for a top five finish. That role has been played at various times in recent years by Brighton, Brentford, Bournemouth, Sunderland, Newcastle, Crystal Palace and, at least initially, Aston Villa.
They have all been subject to the same treatment: their rapid starts, ordinarily involving at least one noteworthy victory against one of the modern-traditional heavyweights, have prompted acres of gushing coverage, fawning paeans about their recruitment departments or their strategic planning or their secret algorithms, all of it trying to answer one question: Can they do it? Can they qualify for the Champions League?
Everton, here, play the role of punchline. They would appear to be the only team in the Premier League that can rise as high as they like in the table and have absolutely nobody even attempt to wonder whether they might be able to stay there for the rest of the season.
A case in point: Everton are currently above Bournemouth – the Premier League’s form team – as well as Aston Villa and Tottenham, both of them surging until this weekend. They are also ahead of Brentford, the (entirely warranted) object of so much admiration for their constant ability to spin gold from whole cloth.
And yet they have done so with what feels like barely a mention, certainly beyond the occasional blandishment for the consistency and reliability of David Moyes’ work. What a job he’s doing, by the way. Now: do Arsenal need to go out and sign another striker in January?
This is an oversight; what Everton have achieved, in their opening stanza to the campaign, almost counts as a full on, loaves-and-fishes style miracle. To recap: Moyes went into the season with barely 18 senior players. The mood at the club was so fractious, before the first game, that the manager was reluctant even to write his column for the matchday program.
That was compounded by the chaos around the attempted move for Folarin Balogun, the United States forward. His medical revealed an injury which forced Everton to pause; the club attempted to move for Joshua Zirkzee on loan as an alternative, but ended up losing both players.
Moyes was left with Thierno Barry, a player he generally describes as “raw,” as his only senior forward. A fans’ mutiny over a proposed sale of Harrison Armstrong succeeded in keeping him at Hill Dickinson; to make the books balance, they had to sell Iliman Ndiaye, their best player, to Manchester City.
It would get worse. It turned out the reason for the parsimony was that the Friedkin Group, the club’s still relatively new owners, were attempting to offload their investment after not quite two years in English football; Moyes revealed in September that he had, in fact, never spoken to Dan Friedkin, his ultimate employer.
#### Can Everton make the Champions League? It does not take too much to say: why not?
### Can Everton make the Champions League? It does not take too much to say: why not?
And then, of course, there is the ongoing uncertainty around Jack Grealish, restored to Everton on loan from Manchester City but excluded from Moyes’ squad for the past 10 days or so because of a “breach of club discipline.” Grealish’s wellbeing remains the priority, but the impact of his absence is more pronounced because of Everton’s paucity of resources.
Given all of that, Everton’s results so far this season are extraordinary. They have lost just twice in the Premier League, to Chelsea at home and away at Arsenal, and they have made it as far as the quarter finals of the Carabao Cup. Beat Fleetwood Town next month and they will be within reach of a first cup final since 2009. Only Erling Haaland and Alexander Isak have scored more league goals than Barry.
It is possible, of course, that the reason nobody is asking if it can be sustained is a tacit understanding of just how much they are exceeding expectations; their squad probably is too small and too stretched to sustain this level of performance over the course of a long and arduous season.
But as much as that is hardly an indefensible approach to take, it seems a shame not to celebrate it while it is happening, to allow the willing suspension of disbelief just a little, to give Moyes and his players the credit and their fans just a bit of a licence to dream. Can Everton make the Champions League? It does not take too much to say: why not?
Photograph by Carl Recine/Getty Images