COMMENT: Moyes ambition shows up dour Keegan diagnosis

May 12 2008 by Nick Smith, Liverpool Daily Post

IF Kevin Keegan can’t whip up the enthusiasm, it must be in trouble. The Newcastle manager’s assertion that, year after year, he is resigned to a boring Premier League, with its pre-determined top four, doesn’t really make him any different from anyone else.

But coming from Kevin Keegan? From the man who managed to get himself up for a kickabout with the Honey Monster in a Sugar Puffs advert? The omens for those outside the established Champions League elite aren’t good.

Which is why Keegan is now going round telling Bill Kenwright he wants to steal his side’s fifth place from them next season. That has become the extent of their ambitions. But as the former England coach said himself, even if it was a subtle-as-a-sledgehammer attempt to sidestep questions about his own future, yesterday was all about Everton.

All about the euphoria of securing another European campaign. But also about where they go from here.

Because if a succession of clubs are queuing up to emulate David Moyes’s achievements, then it’s the Goodison manager himself who should feel most aggrieved about Keegan’s dour diagnosis on the condition of English football’s top flight. It seems to give him nowhere to go in an upwards direction.

Except Moyes doesn’t buy into it. He believes that he can once again break what is now a three-year monopoly on the first four positions.

It has become more difficult since the last time he achieved it, and the Scot acknowledged this himself following yesterday’s 3-1 victory, betraying almost bemusement at the fact that a points total of four more than in 2005 still left Everton way off the pace. Indeed, if Derby are to be discounted, the 11-point gap between the Merseyside clubs in fourth and fifth is the biggest in the league.

So while Keegan, Martin O’Neill, Mark Hughes, Harry Redknapp and the like know who they are aiming for, Moyes’s target for progress does indeed narrow with each passing season.

The rest are still lagging behind trying to land the treble 20s while the Everton manager, although steaming ahead, is now stuck on double one.

European football has become a minimum requirement and that is worth celebrating alone, a representation of what Moyes has established.

And to move on further, building on his first campaign of significant cup runs by seeing one through to the end would be a welcome addition to the CV. The fact that Kenwright felt a “first League Cup semi-final in 20 years” was worth remarking on in his welcome notes at last week’s end-of-season awards dinner, emphasises the paucity of achievements in domestic knockouts during those two decades.

In that time, Leicester, Middlesbrough, Blackburn, Wigan, Bolton, Luton, Sheffield Wednesday and Tranmere have all gone one stage further in that competition, so don’t get too excited. But it’s going up that extra notch in the league that will be the real mark of the rest of Moyes’s reign.

You could argue that rising one position to fifth was about as much as Everton could have expected this year and for that they deserve the highest praise for seeing off those breathing down their necks in the race for UEFA Cup qualification.

Yes, they did threaten Liverpool for a while but the gulf in squad strength was always bubbling beneath the surface before blowing itself out of the water in a one-sided Merseyside derby back in March. Since then, the race for fourth limped to its conclusion, as did Everton’s attempts to secure the spot below it.

A spell which, despite it causing him more stress than he would have wanted, perhaps gives Moyes a stronger position ahead of crucial contract talks in the coming days. Quite simply, he needs to convince his board that the next big-money buy will pay off as successfully as the last one. Yakubu, when it mattered on the final day, was superb against Newcastle and took his tally to 21 goals.

Moyes now has to successfully state the case for who he wants to bring in as the impact player, the one player that can turn a game and be central to the team’s creative hub – especially when the fitness of Mikel Arteta and Tim Cahill is as unreliable as it has been this season.

And especially when the energy supplies that fuel the squad so successfully week after week, begin to run as low as they have recently.

They have needed something different and Moyes now needs someone to provide it. It could determine just how realistic his hopes of giving everyone associated with English football a far more varied and interesting time of it when the treadmill gathers pace again in three months time.

One thing is for certain, however – if Moyes was as pessimistic as yesterday’s opposite number, he wouldn’t stand a chance.