Clayton Beerman asks some searching questions of Guus Hiddink’s second tenure at the club…
After the 2009 FA Cup final I remember my Everton supporting mate taking the mickey out of the chants for Guus Hiddink to stay. I was gutted he wasn’t staying on. He did a great job and couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t. The players obviously loved him but it was not meant to be.
As the end of his second spell approaches there will not be much chanting for him I suspect. It’s hard to know what to think. I’m writing this before we lose away to Liverpool and draw with Leicester but I think if that were actually the case his win percentage would actually be worse than Jose.
So what exactly was his mandate when he came in? Well the most commonly used cliché was to “steady the ship”. That nasty Portuguese man had upset some of the players and we wouldn’t want that, so we get rid of him and bring in the loveable Guus. The players rejoice and within weeks that listing ship has been righted and we are saved from certain relegation. Well that takes us up to January and then what.
Well not a lot. There was a sterile transfer window which saw the arrival of a completely unfit striker and a “prospect”. Both of whom will have played in total less than 2 games each since their respective arrivals in January. In other words a pointless exercise when there are players at the club or on loan who are potentially both equal to or if not better than both of them. Hard to know if Guus was in any way involved.
Notwithstanding our league position when Jose was sacked, with the number of games left a European place was well within our grasp. Since Guus arrived we have won a single home league game but his record away from the Bridge is more than acceptable and had it been replicated at home we would comfortably be sitting in 5th or 6th.
The cups were slightly better although the exit to PSG in the Champions League was predictable with the away leg one of our better perfor
mances this season. With more clinical finishing from Diego we may have got even more. The home leg was close before Diego got injured but the game finished with a whimper. PSGs vastly superior squad showed how far we had fallen in that regard, not anything Guus could have done about that but when we needed to throw the kitchen
sink at the last 25 minutes the white flag was waved and we didn’t even use all of our substitutes.
The FA cup was our only realistic chance of silverware. We played Scunthorpe at home and showing almost a paralysis of fear Guus did not pick one kid against a team in the third tier of football. A turgid 2-0 victory followed. That being said the next two games the demolition of MK Dons and Manchester City, youth was given a chance and Traore was on the score sheet for both games. We had started scoring lots of goals and the 2009 Guus appeared to have entered the building.
However following the exit to PSG we then went to Everton in the quarter final of the cup, a thoroughly woeful performance. As they set about Diego (as many have) his colleagues stood by and the game was summed up perfectly by JT coming on for the 10 men with a couple of minutes to go to play as a centre forward with us already 2-0 down. This was a passionless display against average opponents. The team that day was made up of a lot of the players who played against Spuds at home. That should tell us everything about those players and the manager that we need to know.
The team at times have not been helped by the team selection. The Matic/Mikel partnership whilst solid makes us slower than a turning oil tanker. The away game against Watford was there for the taking but we were too scared to go for it. There has been a complete lack of any ambition, but we were never going down.
There have been some decent performances, especially at the Emirates but let’s face it Swansea have won there as did Watford. Other performances have been poor and in a weak Premier League we have looked what we are an average team that has been worked out. You can’t blame Guus for being without the best player in the club for most of his tenure but there does not ever appear to have been a plan B.
All that being said you have always had the impression from day one that he is being told what to do. By who is another story but there appear to be a lot of people at the club who are “running” or should I say ruining it.
I think my biggest criticism of Guus is since the exit from the cup, every game has been meaningless. Yes we may have been able to qualify for the Europa league but our performances all season have shown this was not going to happen. So in those circumstance how many of our young players have started a game? I think that Baba, RLC, Traore and Kenedy have barely 10 appearances if that between them. Why, still think we are going down?
What has been his mandate? What possible consequence could there be for not playing some of these guys? They could hardly have done any worse. Invaluable experience could have been obtained but that has all been lost. In contrast look at what Klopp has done. He’s played loads of kids and in circumstances where they have had a genuine chance of European qualification through their league position. It would be fascinating to know what he would have done with our promising crop of kids.
This season has all been about treading water since Jose left. To me there has not been any effort at all to move the club forward. It feels like it was written off and that’s it. I cannot point to one positive as this season comes to a conclusion. The success of our youth teams is pointless and not worth celebrating if we enter into another season without any of them being given a sniff of a first team place. Maybe they aren’t good enough but as I have said before, Marcus Rashford was in the
Manchester United team that lost 5-1 to Chelsea in the youth cup. I cannot accept that Tammy Abraham has had no minutes.
Managing our club has become almost impossible and yet until this year the trophies accumulated. There has however been a concerted effort to dismantle the great team of Cech, Cole, Lampard Terry and Drogba and time moves on so that had to be right but where it has fallen down is the lack of integration of other similar players. Now they were greats and that would have been difficult but with the exception of Cole and Cech those other guys did not hit the ground running. As for JT whether he should stay or go is for another blog but the lack of any communication with the fans shows how much we mean to the club and that hurts.
