Disheartened from Dublin writes...

I wrote a number of articles over the summer and early into the season. While they covered a range of subjects — quite often several subjects in the one article — they felt easy to write. They not only gave me the scope to have my say on where I felt the club was at, they also made me feel like I was an actual fan, an Evertonian contributing to an Evertonian website and engaging with other Evertonians. 

For context, I live in Dublin. I've never been to a live game, I rarely get to watch a game on TV, and don't get to chat with actual Evertonians in the flesh. I was 51 in the summer and, more often than not, I've felt myself drifting away from the club. Work and family commitments, including a 23-year-old son with special needs, plus the prohibitive cost and time involved in getting to and watching games, all meant that even when the club was doing well, I wasn't really an active supporter.

I would keep an eye out for results, keep an eye on live scores, maybe have Sky's Soccer Saturday on in the background, but I wasn't really that involved. Even emotionally, I wasn't getting that upset with a poor result or performance anymore. 

Yes, perfomances on the pitch were poor. Yes, the club was being ran as a joke. Yes, we were falling behind in terms of finances and being attractive to quality players, but it was also little things. Persistant login issues with ToffeeWeb for example, meant that I was not able to interact the way I can now on Evertonia. An easy-to-achieve level of engagement that I could do on the couch with my laptop gone.

Another example was the change in kick off to the Sunday game on Sky. The 4pm timeslot used to suit me perfectly. I would get down to my local, three easy pints, watch the game, and then be home to get my son out of the bath and give him his tea. Then the timeslot got changed to 4:30pm and the opportunity seemed to slip away. 

The one thing that really kept me from becoming cut adrift altogether was the websites. ToffeeWeb, before it's most recent incarnation, and then Evertonia have both kept me involved enough so that, along with what little other effort I was making,  I cared just enough to keep going. In part, if I'm honest, what also kept me going was a certain perverse sense of pride that we had avoided relegation, and given the two fingers to everyone who viewed us as non-entities. 

Then the last 12 months happened. Everything that was positive, and that led me to contirbuting articles like it was going out of fashion, started to make me feel like a proper fan again.  The club, the stadium, the finances, the players, the squad development, all appeared to be on an upward curve. I started thinking about watching games on TV again and how I could make or find the time. Even some of the daydreaming started back. Everton qualifying for Europe was the big one. 

But then the last four or five games happened. All the enthusiasm, all the momentum, all the positive psychology just evaporated. It was genuinely gut-wrenching, really really disheartening. And the worst thing about it was, it wasn't a VAR decision in one game, it wasn't being hammered by a far superior team in a one off situation, it wasn't just one off day. It was that over a number of games, the players seemed to just not be bothered. They just didn't seem to want to try.

And when you see Michael Keane getting a red card for pulling another player's pony tail, where do you start with that? When you see an experienced player like Jack Grealsih getting a red card for not being able to take a big hint with his first yellow card and keep quiet, where do you start with that? (But then, maybe Keane and Gueye slapping the head off each other before Christmas should have been a warning of things.)

As a fan in general, I can put my long term view hat on, I can put my work in progress hat on. I can remind myself of how threadbare the squad was at the start of the summer transfer window. I can tell myself that the quality players who were making such a positive difference in so many ways up to Christmas are either injured, suspended or at AFCON. All of these points make a logical sense, both individually and collectively, but as a salve, make no difference at all when players just don't seem to want to do the minimum of what fans ask and expect of them. 

There are times when I've even thought that a football fan is cursed to forever live emotionally from game to game, permenantly stuck in a loop of ups and downs. I've reminded myself of this every day for several weeks now and then tell myself that somehow logic will usually counteract it to some degree. This hasn't worked either when I'm struggling with feeling so disheartened. 

I know that I'm sounding overly dramatic, I know that I sound like I'm looking for sympathy as a fan living abroad. I'm honestly not. My usual longwinded point is that for any fan, regardless of where you live, it is getting harder and harder to stay engaged, to stay involved with your club. Life has any amount of ways in which it gets in the way. It is becoming a bigger and bigger ask of yourself, and of your family, to make the time to be engaged, to be involved, practically, emotionally, financially and time wise.

As a result, we put a huge amount of faith in players making us happy, making all the time and effort worthwhile. In making all the bad times acceptable when you feel the rush of the good times. When it feels like the players don't want to reciprocate, it becomes the worst feeling in the world as fans. It makes the effort unacceptable.

A post-Villa addendum

Lyndon had been away and hadn't got around to posting the above on the website before the Aston Villa game on Sunday. That performance seemed to totally contradict the point of the article, both in terms of the players attitude and how one good result can suddenly give a fan their mojo back.

Lyndon was kind enough to email me to ask if, following the performance on Sunday, did I still want the article posted in it's original format. I said yes as I would post a response when I got a chance. I let the result perculate for a day or two and this is what I came up with:

I still stand over the original point of the article. It had been disheartening to see the January performances from the squad. While an injury hit one, the squad contained several players who had ground out results over a couple of seasons of being genuinely relegation threatened. The fight and the heart that these same players had shown over those seasons, had just seemed to have evaporated. One game is a blip, a bad day at the office, but three or four over a period of weeks was gut wrenching, especially when you look at how well the same players had played, both indivdually, and together, over the course of this season. 

There is an oft-used phrase among Everton fans that it is the hope that kills you. Perhaps this season had been going so well, especially when compared to the relegation threatened ones, the poor run of games felt like twice the kicking. Perhaps it was a case of just when you're starting to enjoy being a fan again, These performances happen and you think, why bother? 

But, then Sunday's game, and performance happens. Not only do you get the right mentaility from players, but all those little niggles that had tugged at you all season, seemed to have resolved themselves in one game. We had square pegs in square holes in terms of a right back and centre halves in their right positions. We had a proper right back in Patterson giving a good solid performance. A new signing in Merlin Rohl gave a good perfornace in midfield. He's suddenly worth keeping and the transfer committee have actually come good. Barry scores AGAIN up front and we might just have a striker worth sticking with. 

One game, one performance, one afternoon, and it all seems to be worth it. That's all it took to make me happy, to make it all seem worthwhile. That's all it has ever taken for most fans of most clubs.  The players putting a shift in. It hasn't made me blind to all that still needs to be done. It hasn't suddenly made me think that we'll win the league next season. Like mose football fans, even when being a fan, I'm still tuned in enough to reality to know where my club is at in the grand scheme of things. One good day will keep me going, just bear with me if I have the odd wobble and threaten to leave. 

Now, as for Grealish's foot injury...