EVERYONE in football seemingly agrees on the old adage “The league table doesn’t lie.”
Truth and fairness don’t always go hand in hand though.
When Everton’s 38 Premier League fixtures of the 2009/10 season are completed on May 9 it’s still a long shot that they’ll have done what is required to secure European football for a fourth successive term.
Over that entire nine-month period they’re unlikely to have been consistent enough to achieve that particular goal.
A fourth successive top-half finish should be in the bag – it could have been six if David Moyes’s men hadn’t been held on the last day back in 2006 in another campaign in which they were playing catch-up.
Considering Everton only finished in the top half once in the Premier League in the decade before Moyes’s arrival that will be no mean feat but as the Scot himself acknowledges, the bar of expectation has been raised considerably by himself since then.
But while the columns of played, won, drawn and lost, goals for and against and ultimately their points total will record Everton’s season in black and white along with all their peers, they alone will not be able to do justice to the real story of how this season has unfolded.
League tables cannot include mitigating footnotes for crippling injuries but while a final table speaks the truth, it is a fact that the spine of Everton’s team was missing for long periods this term with a cruel injury list – which began in the run-up to last year’s FA Cup final – making a mockery of some of their rivals’ complaints about their own sick notes.
Saturday’s victory over Bolton – a club record seventh home win in the Premier League – had an intriguing symmetry about it.
The run began with a 2-0 success against a Burnley side, also managed at the time by Owen Coyle, on December 28.
Not only were the scorelines and the opposite number to Moyes in the away dugout identical but both victories were achieved following needless sendings-off from players in the away camp.
Stephen Jordan saw red for the Clarets following a senseless and prolonged tug on Steven Pienaar’s jersey while on this occasion Gretar Steinsson got his marching orders for an (un)professional foul on Ayegbeni Yakubu.
Even if Steinsson had not made his untimely challenge, there was a feeling around Goodison that the hosts, who had prompted and probed for over two-thirds of the contest, were eventually going to get their just rewards.
It’s the kind of confidence that a sequence of now seven successive Premier League home wins brings.
Although Saturday’s win over the Trotters came with an encouraging first clean sheet in 10 outings since the 1-0 success over another Lancashire rival Wigan on January 30, Moyes’s men’s league form since the turn of the calendar year has been terrific.
It’s telling that if the season had started on January 1 then Everton would currently be standing in third place.
Indeed, their record-breaking run which includes successes over Chelsea and Manchester United – can realistically be extended into double figures with West Ham, Fulham and Portsmouth the remaining visitors to Goodison this term.
So where does all this leave Everton?
