A year to the day earlier, Everton’s first team had kept going right until the end against a team in all red and, just as a spectacular strike from James Tarkowski had earned David Moyes’ men a deserved equaliser to make the score 2-2, Braiden Graham repeated the trick against Ipswich Town in the FA Youth Cup fifth round last night.
That occasion, some 12 months before, was of course the last-ever Merseyside Derby at Goodison Park.
With the clock ticking down, a spectacular volley from the home captain, with what proved to be the final kick of the game from a Blues player ensured that after 120 matches in over 130 years of combat across Stanley Park, Liverpool did not finish with a winning record at ‘The Grand Old Lady.’
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Of course, the stakes were nowhere near as high on this occasion, but Graham’s strike was one of quality that would have graced any stage and, with a winner required on the night, it provided the platform for Keith Southern’s side to go on and triumph in this tie in the subsequent 30 minutes.
It was the Under-18s who became the first Everton team to play in this arena, which would become Hill Dickinson Stadium, just five days after that heavyweight clash at ‘The Grand Old Lady’ that Tarkowski remarked saw him having “an 80-year-old grabbing me and then a five-year-old kid pulling me to the floor” before a hectic postscript that included four red cards shown after the final whistle.
That landmark occasion would be a friendly match against their Wigan Athletic counterparts in what was the first of three test events, a night when Ray Robert wrote himself into the history books by becoming the first Blues scorer at their future home by netting a penalty in a 2-1 defeat.
After coming off the bench, the 17-year-old was on target again here in front of the South Stand and happily this time it was to put his side in front in what would ultimately be a 4-2 victory, but it was the man who made his goal who proved to be the star of the show, having taken the tie into extra-time with his last-gasp leveller.
Graham possesses that commodity that will always be valuable in football in that he appears to be a natural finisher. Whatever level he plays at and whichever position he’s deployed in, he knows where the back of the net is.
The boy from Ballygowan was playing first-team football back in his native Northern Ireland when he was just 15 and his Linfield manager David Healy, who is no less than the national team’s all-time leading scorer, said of him: “He’s goals, goals, goals, he prowls in and around and he’s a deadly finisher.”
Back then, Graham was operating as a pretty orthodox striker, but in modern Premier League football where the classic ‘big man/small man’ partnership of a generation ago has been replaced by lone frontmen who are often required to display a significant degree of physicality to lead the line – current Everton centre-forwards Thierno Barry and Beto are 6ft 5in and 6ft 4in respectively – the 5ft 9in prospect is now finding himself cutting inside from wide positions.
He remains a threat, though, and can both take and make chances as we saw here.
Playing at Hill Dickinson Stadium in senior matches in front of over 50,000 fans has to be the ultimate goal of all these players and right now, Graham, who was twice named on David Moyes’ bench for the games against Nottingham Forest and Sunderland in December and January respectively, appears to be leading the way.