David Moyes Knows The Club and at Everton that’s not a p***-take

‘Never go back’ is clearly not a maxim David Moyes feels compelled to follow.
The 11-and-a-half years since he left Everton, after 11 years in charge, have contained two spells at West Ham. The good news for Everton fans is that he defied the conventional wisdom; his second spell was far more successful than his first.
Now he is back at Goodison, and if his second crack at Everton is more successful than his first then he really will have done something special; he might even get a second go at Manchester United.
It’s easy to be glib about Moyes, a manager who will never fully recover from being so utterly exposed in the rarefied air at United. But there is no shame in being not quite right for super-club management. And what he did in over a decade at Everton always looked impressive at the time and only increasingly so as the club lurched haphazardly one way then the other in his absence.
Perhaps the most revealing statistic of all is this: Moyes has now been away from Everton for pretty much as long as he was there, and there have been eight ‘permanent’ managers in the broadly miserable and trying years since a decade of Moyesian stability at the people’s club.
And that doesn’t include the assorted Evertonians who have taken on interim or caretaker duties in between that string of disappointments, culminating last week in a reminder of what Moyes brought to this club as Moyes-era legends Seamus Coleman – famously secured for a mere 60 grand – and Leighton Baines took charge for the FA Cup win over Peterborough.
While Everton have been guilty of stumbling around in search of an identity post Moyes – a list of managerial appointments that reads Roberto Martinez, Ronald Koeman, Sam Allardyce, Marco Silva, Carlo Ancelotti, Rafael Benitez, Frank Lampard, Sean Dyche is a decade-long cry for help – the obvious criticism here is that Dyche to Moyes represents too little change and too much pragmatism to go with, dare we say it, a little bit of romanticism.
It’s not quite fair. West Ham fans, with their Academy of Football schtick, never quite took to Moyes even after he ended their 40-year wait for a trophy and it’s absolutely fair to say he never quite seemed to make the absolute best of the sparkling attacking tools he had in his arsenal at the London Stadium. But while a pragmatist, he has never been as stubbornly one-dimensional as Dyche.
He left a club in a solid position and returns to one in disrepair, but one where he perhaps more than any other manager realistically available can restore hope and pride. There is obviously something fitting about Moyes being the man to lead Everton into a new era at a new stadium after everything he has achieved and experienced at Goodison, while the gut tells you that the chances of that new stadium making its bow in the Premier League rather than Championship is improved by Moyes’ return.
Moyes’ return must surely rank as the single most Knows The Club appointment in Barclays history. It’s a phrase often used derisively, to suggest it is the only qualification a manager possesses. It’s taken Frank Lampard a long way, for instance. But Moyes has more. He doesn’t just know this club, he knows how to make it work. He understands Everton and its supporters deeply.
There’s a good chance that one way or another this will be Moyes’ last hurrah. Especially if he hangs around anything like as long as he did the first time. There is, inevitably, the risk that he tarnishes the legacy he built up over those first 11 years in charge. But such has been Everton’s decline since he left that the likelihood is a further burnish instead.
READ: Six Everton moves for David Moyes’ perfect January transfer window