Blue watch: Work still to be done pre-season for Everton

Jul 16 2008 Mark O'Brien Liverpool Daily Post

NO doubt the vast majority of Evertonians were encouraged this week when they read that progress is being made with David Moyes’s contract.

However, it might be a bit premature to then deduce that the manager must have been reassured that he has a decent transfer fund, and that in turn we can expect to see some big names doing the whole shirt-holding thing any time soon.

While we would all like to believe that the only thing that matters to the manager, or any other employee of the club, is how they can do their bit to ensure progress is made on the pitch, you can almost certainly guarantee that the delays over Moyes’s new deal will have revolved around his remuneration, and not cash for players.

After all, why would he turn down the chance to increase his earnings – by a substantial amount according to most reports – because the transfer kitty is only small?

It would make more sense for him to complain about that next summer, after earning big money for a year, and then if he feels that he can’t take the Blues further any club wishing to tempt him from Goodison would have to match his favourable terms.

That’s not a criticism of Moyes, he has every right to try and earn what he’s worth, but while it will be good to have this whole contract issue sorted out there’s still clearly a lot of work that remains to be done elsewhere before the season starts.

Now, granted, the club can’t help who they are linked to in the press, as various agents and players’ representatives love to intimate that all sorts of clubs are interested in their clients at this time of year, but the fact that there don’t really seem to be any clear cut names in the frame is a less than positive sign.

In our most productive summers it has been more or less evident who Moyes is after from the start, be it Joleon Lescott or Andy Johnson, for instance, and he’s pursued them single-mindedly.

When things have been allowed to drag on and it has looked like agents have been dictating the agenda to some extent, we have been linked with a multitude of foreign players about whom no one knows anything – as we are now – and we’ve ended up with panicky looking deals for the likes of Andy van der Meyde and Matteo Ferrari.

Obviously there is still time for the Blues to make some rapier-like raids into the transfer market – and they might have their targets firmly locked in their sights already – but that’s certainly not the vibe, for want of a better word, coming out of Goodison at present.

At the end of last season all the talk was of an important summer as we try to do what is necessary to have a stab at breaking into the top four or at least preserve our relatively newly-acquired status as a UEFA Cup side.

From tentative links with the likes of Andrei Arshavin though, we are now said to be after slightly less stellar names like Riki, Mehmet Topal and Stephan Lichsteiner.

What’s even more disconcerting is the feeling that even these deals might be dependent on the sale of Andy Johnson.

The increasingly widely held belief is also that the club can’t afford to borrow any more cash without knowing whether they can secure loans against the increased revenues that a new stadium would hopefully generate.

Perhaps this is all the product of a ‘glass is half-empty’ outlook, but it’s really up to the club to start proving to Evertonians that it is indeed half-full.