COMMENT: Moyes looks to transfer great strides into Europe

Oct 1 2007 by Chris Beesley, Liverpool Daily Post

INSTEAD of being questioned about his team selection, David Moyes was asked about his choice of a suit rather than his usual tracksuit by one post-match interviewer.

Buoyed by an Everton performance that was just as smart as his jacket and trouser combination, the Goodison manager was happy to indulge in a bit of banter and claimed the club had given him a better suit to wear plus he’d had a bit of a cold so he decided not to change.

But once the small talk about his new-found sartorial elegance dies down there no doubt that the only tie Moyes is really concerned with this week the UEFA Cup trip to Metalist Kharkiv on Thursday.

This truly is a week that will shape not only this season for Everton but future campaigns too.

Failure really isn’t an option when it comes to Moyes’s mission to Ukraine but as the first-round encounter enters its second stage it is Everton’s opponents who hold the upper hand following their 1-1 draw at Goodison.

Over the past five-and-a-half years, Everton have made massive strides in the Premier League under Moyes.

When he came to the club in March 2002, the team were fighting one of their then-usual relegation battles and had only finished in the top half of the table once in the decade since England’s top division was re-branded.

Since then there have been three top-half finishes and talented, often young, players mainly want to come through Goodison’s entrance rather than exit door.

Yet for all the solid groundwork establishing a platform for relative domestic success, mastering the art of continental competition has, to date, remained something of an unsolved riddle on the blue side of Stanley Park.

It might seem unfair to compare Everton’s European record to that of their neighbours, particularly given the obvious reasons why Everton’s best-ever side was denied the chance to compete abroad at a time when they were ripe to conquer.

We all know what happened in 1985 and the affect that it had but at a particularly poignant time in the year 2007 when the city’s two clubs and their fans are uniting in a cause of peace and solidarity there is no need to delve further into those murky waters.

The fact is, when English clubs were allowed back into European competition, Liverpool were still strong enough to qualify on a regular basis whereas Everton were not.

Since Rapid Vienna were beaten 3-1 in the Cup-Winners’ Cup final 22 years ago, Everton have faced just five European clubs.

In 1995 came Icelandic minnows KR Reykjavik, who Joe Royle’s FA Cup winners made a meal of overcoming 3-2 away and 3-1 at home and they were followed by crack Dutch outfit Feyenoord who forced a goalless draw at Goodison before triumphing 1-0 in the second leg in Rotterdam.

Fast forward a decade, Everton’s unlikely Champions League hopefuls were given a stern draw in the qualifying round against Villarreal and went down 2-1 in both legs despite having a Duncan Ferguson goal controversially disallowed in Spain that would have levelled the aggregate scores.

With the stuffing knocked out of Moyes’s troops following what they saw as an unfair defeat, a bizarre second half collapse at Dinano Bucharest saw a 5-1 humiliation which made Everton’s 1-0 second leg victory at Goodison irrelevant.

Imagine trying to dilute Liverpool’s European record over the past 15 years into a couple of paragraphs like that.

Last season there wasn’t an awful lot to choose between Merseyside’s big two.

Liverpool were the third best team in the land and Everton the sixth.

Indeed with a 3-0 win in the Goodison derby and a goalless draw at Anfield, Everton enjoyed the spoils in the clubs’ head-to-head battles.

But when it comes to cracking Europe, the gap that Everton have to bridge has so far remained a chasm.

So at a time when Everton need to pull a positive European result out of the bag, it seems the cavalry have arrived at just the right time with Messrs Mikel Arteta and Steven Pienaar galloping over the hill and into sight.

The silky midfield play-makers pulled all the strings in a composed and measured 2-0 defeat of Middlesbrough that was the kind of performance Everton should have produced against Metalist 10 days earlier.

While there was plenty of cut and thrust and blood and thunder from Moyes’s men in the first leg, injuries to Arteta and Pienaar and even Thomas Gravesen ensured they were painfully lacking a midfield presence who could control the game and even slow it down when needed.

With back-to-back clean sheets – their first of the season in the league – and five goals in two games, Everton couldn’t have really asked for much more on the pitch in their week ahead of their trip to Kharkiv.

Everyone at Goodison will now be hoping that the confidence from the Sheffield Wednesday and Middlesbrough results can now continue into Thursday’s showdown so Everton can finally start to establish themselves as a European force – something that is well overdue.

After all, if you get to a cup final then both the manager and his players get to wear new suits.