LET’S buck the trend for a moment at least and talk about something other than Everton’s emaciated looking squad.

Every season there is some new initiative for referees to follow, be it the clamping down on challenges from behind or a greater focus on punishing two-footed tackles, and it invariably causes mayhem early on as confused officials try to apply the letter of the law to players who are unsure of the new boundaries.

The FA have outdone themselves this time though with their ‘Respect Agenda’. Honestly, they might as well have just called it the ‘Oh Please Play Nice’ agenda. It’s all very well everyone regarding the half-hearted Community Shield as a successful pilot for the new world order, but just wait until the Premier League starts on Saturday and see if the players will bite their tongues and respectfully address all queries through their captain when there are 40,000 fans screaming for blood.

You only have to listen to interviews with players, like John Terry for instance, to hear what they think of the initiative, despite giving it their backing.

The first thing that the one-time England captain said when asked about the issue of respect was that it works both ways and that players will respect the officials but more or less on the proviso that they give good decisions.

The fact of the matter though, is that referees give bad decisions all the time, but the very crux of the whole issue is that they are the final arbiter of the rules and so the players have to accept those rulings whether they agree with them or not.

Until managers get on board and set a better example in the way they treat referees then nothing is going to change.

We might get a flurry of bookings for dissent in the first few weekends but players will continue to chip away in the knowledge that the officials can’t send everyone off.

However, if it suited the top men at Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal for the game to be cleaned up then the problems would be solved over night.

Their teams are often the worst offenders though, and nothing the FA says is ever going to change that, because ultimately we all know where the power really lies in English football.Give kids a chance

IT’S difficult to know what to add to the mass wails of Evertonians who are genuinely mystified as to what sort of team David Moyes is going to send out against Blackburn on Saturday.

Needless to say, the injury to Steven Pienaar, who was one our better performers in a grim friendly against PSV Eindhoven, could not have come at a more inopportune moment.

Heaven forbid, what happens if Ayegbeni Yakubu takes a knock early on against Paul Ince’s side?

The fact that Everton’s assistant manager and some of the players have been talking up Jose Baxer in the Press this week, and admiring his maturity, makes us think that Moyes may be reduced to throwing the 16-year-old on at some stage.

Now none of us doubt that the kids will give everything they’ve got should they be called upon, but ideally we would want to see one or two of them being eased in over the course of the season.

As it stands, Jack Rodwell and Dan Gosling look almost certain to start on Saturday, while the bench will look like the back row of the school bus.

Fingers crossed that home advantage and Rovers’s own troubles might see us through and buy us another week to finally get some new faces in.