On many occasions I have been exposed to the usual drunkard in the pub,over the age of 35,declare his pity for the 18 year old he is speaking to (me-god help him),because as far as he is concerned during my lifetime,ignoring the FA Cup win of 95, I’ve never seen us win anything and most definetly have seen a load of rubbish.The drunkard will get all nostalgic saying such things as ‘ah,those were the days’, usually referring to Bracewell and Peter Reid’s great understanding in the centre of the park and cultured footballing talent.
We won the league by a distance that season.We had strength in depth – Kevin Richardson was always unlucky to be in Kevin Sheedy’s shadow, because the man had talent, but are depth was such he didn’t even play in that seasons CWC final.Adrian Heath,a man who’s talent in my opinion still wasn’t and isn’t appreciated was an excellent foil for Graeme Sharp if injuries required it.
We still had money to burn,still the ‘Mersey Millionaires’as the next season proved were we tried to push and and splashed loads of green on Gary Liniker who’s addition if we’dve been permitted to contest the European Cup would’ve increased our chances.
Liverpudlians will say we’d never of got to the 86 European final anyway because we were not even ‘good enough’ to win that years league championship…….a silly view really, considering they did exactly that in the infamous Heysel final of 1985.
Evertonians have never really exalted Liverpool Football Club and its fans from blame in relation to that disaster.The product of this is the intense bitterness between the two sets of supporters, and with Liverpool winning the Champions League recently and their younger section of fans banging on about, while I do not condone it I can understand why our fans who weren’t born at the time who think that we never had our chance because of their indiscipline (and Margaret Thatcher) respond with jibes about Heysel.That is the annoying thing with the Liverpudlians,they always miss the point that we never had our chance, to push on further and make history. Indeed it has been a curse to Everton many times to not being given the chance to push on – we won the league in 1915 then everybody got called up to war, same thing happened in 1939 when we won it again.So Kopites need to look deeper into other factors to realise why we have what they see as only a meagre total of 9 leagues……..oh and no European Cups because again our chance of being able to push on was thwarted by Uefa banning all English clubs from European competition.
This had other consequences too, indeed I believe it is why we started to go on a downward spiral post 1987, because although most of the spine of our side were content to stay for the first two years of European football exile, they eventually became impatient and unfortunately for them however happy they were at Everton, if you wanted european football that meant moving on to new pastures abroad. Trevor Steven,probably to some our best player, went for the French experience at Marseille, and even more catastrophically – we lost our legendary manager Howard Kendall to the attraction of european football in the Spanish league at Bilbao. The lack of european football had destructive consequences on splitting up the impoetus of that great 1985 side.
They are the ‘other’ factors. The point I’m getting to is this:Would we have won the European cup given the chance?Indeed it seemed a tendency of the time that CWC winners went on in later years to win the games ultimate prize – Juventus took 2 years to do it and Barcelona a little bit longer but with mostly the same team. Also, if you have a look at the teams who won the European cup from 1986-88 (Milan were good in 89), they are very poor.Eindhoven only had Ruud Gullit,Steua Bucharest only won against Barca in 86 on pens. Are team was easily good enough to put these imposters away.They must be seen as a ‘charade’……..the puppet winners of the trophy at a time when possibly europes best team was not permitted to take part.Its a thing that hurts Evertonians and never goes away as we ask:just how good was that team……and to be honest, the hurt comes from the answer – we never got to and never will know.
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