Yeah to be honest I’d be fine with him joining Everton (although I’d prefer West Brom – we’ve already played them twice in the league), especially since it looks like we’ll recuperate most if not all of what we paid to sign him.
What I won’t enjoy though is the smugness that I guarantee will emanate out of Goodison Park as soon as he turns in even the most remote prospect of a 6/10 performance. You see, I’ve discovered in the past half an hour that Everton as a football club have mastered the art of smugness. Let’s consider the managers first. Way back when, bulging-eyed Davey Moyes was heralded as the salt-of-the-earth, British jobs for British workers man of the people that every football club should want to have in the dugout. Match of the Day’s questionably-shirted scholiasts used words like ‘proud’ and ‘dogged’ to describe Everton, although for some reason not to describe their proud tradition of dogged failure to beat a top six team away from home. Then it turned out that, away from the flattering blue lighting of their half of Merseyside, Moyes was just bitter and incompetent (although the eyes really did bulge). But I’m not sure they actually noticed this, because at the time they had Roberto Martínez as manager.
It was at this point that Everton really became the epicentre of all that was beautiful and good about football. They played the right way, with the right players, and the right manager doing the right things with the right chairman and probably the right ball boys too. They were never as vocal about real or perceived excellence as Liverpool, but I never said they were brash, just smug. 'Pool have always been very proactive in their self-delusion, Everton prefer to bask in the light of their own (self-)righteousness. The ‘the school of science’ was now back (other teams in English – and indeed world – football had of course by now reverted to offering sacrifice to Zeus and occasionally Odin, before deciding their next line up by watching the flights of birds). Unfortunately like a large number of unregulated free schools, their performance soon left a lot to be desired. Undeterred, Everton swiftly put that behind them with the perfect managerial appointment for their club: Ronald Koeman.
Now what’s smug about the current Everton manager isn’t what’s made of him by the fans so much as his own personal demeanour. Ronald is a man of quite exceptional smugness. Take the post-match interview after the Southampton game just gone. Ronnie spends the whole interview fighting a battle with the corners of his mouth, which are coiled and ready to curl up into the conceited smile of a smug, smug man. Sometimes he lets them win, sometimes he appears to have chased off the smile entirely, only for it to come back. He’s not even that happy that Everton won, just that Southampton lost, and they’ll be unhappy. He’s doing it just to spite them (and not even because they used to employ him, although it definitely helps). Ronald Koeman is the kind of man who would smear himself in marmite and roll around in your clothes and bank-notes. Not because he’d enjoy it – I don’t think there’s a man alive who wants to be covered in marmite, clothes and cash – but because you’d hate it more than he would.
He reminds me of my cousin Vinnie’s cat. This cat ran the show at Vinnie’s house, and would shit on the floor at will, for no other conceivable reason than just to spite Vinnie. He seemed to do it constantly; although in retrospect it may have just been triggered by my presence (can’t think why though). Mercifully the cat died some years back in a surprisingly bloody collision with an agricultural vehicle. Its name escapes me, but may have genuinely been Ronald, which would have been fitting. He also really looked like Ronald: plump and ginger, with a certain greasy radiance of dubious origin. It wasn’t that he lit up the room, more that you couldn’t help but notice him out of the corner of your eye and shudder slightly. If Ronald Koeman were shitting on your floor I expect it would be much the same.
Returning at not-unreasonable length to my actual point, we should prepare for Everton’s smugness about having ‘brought Schneiderlin back to his best’, ‘shown the true talent of a quality and underappreciated player’ and possibly ‘saved ickle Morgan from the nasty men’ if we sell him to them. This is the club that opened a shop in the Liverpool One shopping centre called ‘Everton Two’. The address is thus ‘Everton Two, Liverpool One’. In fairness this is definitely funny, but to my mind it’s made even more so by their complete inability to actually get a winning scoreline against the Dippers on the pitch since the time of the prophet Roy (Kopites 26.35). The smugness continues unabated, which in hindsight makes them a perfect club for Tom Cleverley, whose Spanish style isn’t appreciated elsewhere.
