One Moore Thought

Everton might have been in somewhat indifferent form in pre-season; but I can’t wait for the whole football thing to kick-start again and go up and down the land watching the Toffees, cheering them on come rain, shine and all else – and deep down, I bet each and every reader cannot wait for football to get back to all of it immense seriousness. This, as you know already though, is no ordinary season ahead for us – for the first time in a century-and-a-third, our home turf isn’t Goodison Park, but it now is, in fact, on the site of the former Bramley-Moore Dock.

As you might know, Bramley Moore Dock was named after John Bramley-Moore; this was a chap born in Leeds in 1800. Bramley-Moore would eventually relocate to Liverpool and go on to be elected to Liverpool’s Town Council (in 1841) and he would also to go on to be the chairman of the Dock Committee. He lived to the grand old age (especially as it would be in 19th Century Britain) of 86- according to the Office for National Statistics, that is approximately double the life expectancy of the average British male born during the 1880s.

After a period living in Buckinghamshire, Bramley-Moore eventually died in Brighton (but he is buried in Liverpool nonetheless; at St Michael’s, Toxteth Park). Perhaps Everton expressly requested to play Leeds and Brighton at the start of the season, in either order, for that very historical link our new site has to the present – or perhaps the fixture generator allocated these matches truly at random – but surely, now the Roma ‘test’ game is out of the way and the proper football is set fair to recommence, there can be no more fitting opponents to usher in a truly new Everton era given our brand new location. Let’s be grateful both Leeds and Brighton are in the top-flight when it mattered in order to pay that unique homage to our new abode, as it is not that long ago that both of those clubs were well and truly out of it…

 …And a very final thought on Moore: Everton have played neither Wycombe nor Milton Keynes in a competitive fixture. In fact, I am fairly certain that we have never played any professional club from Buckinghamshire, ever. It would be quite incredible if one of the domestic cups changed that statistic. Whilst we are at it, the same seems to be true also of the following counties: Cornwall, Herefordshire, Isle of Wight, Rutland and Worcestershire.