THE excesses of Christmas tend to catch up with most of us on New Year’s Day. But David Moyes will be nursing a bigger headache than most now the festivities have died down, after his Everton side came agonisingly close to emerging from the non-stop holiday schedule unbeaten.
Like a Christmas toy that the kids haven’t turned off all week, the batteries are bound to run out eventually, no matter how much players are paid and primed to cope with the crazy calendar congestion.
Saturday, followed by a midweek Boxing Day, then Saturday again is manageable, but sometimes the cliche of ‘one game too far’ is as difficult to get rid of as the leftover turkey.
Yet there was enough energy left in the power supply yesterday to ignite a rousing finale which had seemed beyond Moyes’s tired troops when second-half substitute Georgios Samaras scored his second from the penalty spot with 18 minutes left.
Leon Osman’s fine strike paved the way for Everton’s best spell of pressure of a game short on creativity but it simply arrived too late as, despite what seemed a decent penalty appeal and a succession of late corners, the toast to the New Year fell decidedly flat.
As 2007 marks the 20th anniversary of the time Everton last ruled England it’s fitting that they saw in the year in suchtitle-winning form.
They’re clearly not ready to conquer the nation again yet, as the gallant defeat to current champions Chelsea showed, but seven points from the nine available since then at least sent them three places closer to the summit.
There was no way Everton could improve on seventh at the City of Manchester Stadium thanks to the four-point gap between themselves and the top six, and the dropping of one place on the back of this defeat hardly makes yesterday’s defeat the most damaging to Moyes’s ambitions.
But the consistency that took Everton into the middle of October unbeaten remains frustratingly out of reach as they failed to follow up the destruction of Newcastle two days earlier.
That time gap tells its own story of the dilemma Moyes faced in pondering whether to stick with the same 11 that from that victory and whether they could reproduce something similar within 48 hours.
