PERCEPTION

THERE is a piece which was posted on one of the message boards that has been playing on my mind.
It was written by a Southend fan and it’s about Everton’s habitual bad luck. So far, so random.

It’s well-written, well-argued and seems to have struck a chord with a lot of blues. The majority of responses on the boards loved it, many seeming to find validation in this neutral’s bang-on observations.
I’m not so happy with it.
It’s not the observations or tone either, because he’s right about our bad luck and without a hint of condescension.
What I resent is the responses it triggered. Blues punching the air and saying “He gets it. He understands us.”
But what element of ‘us’ does he understand? The victim culture? The insecurity which so many injustices have left us harbouring?
It seems to reflect a mindset which does us no favours. That we will never achieve anything because, ‘We’re Everton’ and ‘We always get stitched up’ blah blah.
An example is Blackburn away. Before I go on, I know I blogged about the infuriating decision to give AJ’s legal goal offside.
But we wouldn’t have been left to rue that injustice if we had taken any of the other chances which our superior play created.
We need to stop reverting to fading stereotypes of a hard-done by club and instead take the mental step up. We are a big club. We are fourth. We are there on merit.
Fourth place is ours to throw away. Yes there’s a chance we will finish fourth ahead of Liverpool and they will go and win the Champion’s League. We all semi-joke about it before shuddering at the memories of 2005.
It’s not easy because the last 25 years have seen us suffer some very bad luck which has undoubtedly left deep scars and held us back.
But we need to develop a strength of mind as fans, which can then seep into the whole club.
We need to develop a confidence about our club and project that to everyone. Slowly but surely we need to dismantle the sentiment behind the article below and start getting positive.
For obvious reasons you won't find Manchester United and Arsenal fans who are so negative about their club.
And I’m not suggesting we should ever be as arrogant as the irritating fans of the G4 clubs.
I do think we need to start believing more though.
I was very low after the Chelsea Carling cup defeat because it felt like our chance at silverware had vanished again.
Then the side brushed themselves off and carried on winning. On Wednesday, cup football is back and if we can be disciplined and efficient over in Norway we can start dreaming again.
Anyway, I’ve posted the article below. Let me know what you think.

THERE are times in my life when I'm incredibly grateful to my dad for taking me to see Southend United on my 11th birthday.
It was freezing cold, everything smelt of fried onions, someone urinated on my trainers and Huddersfield won 1-0. But somehow it felt so right.
It was the start of an unlikely love affair with a football team that is doomed forever to wander the lower leagues like a mournful wraith.
Southend will never win anything of note, we will never field England internationals and we are unlikely to launch our own TV station, but my God, it must be more fun than being an Everton fan.
Everton are that bloke in your office who arrives an hour before anyone else and always stays late, but never gets that pay rise.
They're the desperate wedding guest who never catches the bouquet.
They're the house-trained, fully-grown Labrador in the dog pound that never gets chosen because the puppies look cuter.
They are destined to do everything right, but inexplicably fail.
Have a look at the League table, they're in fourth place. Reckon it will last? Of course it won't.
Fractious, underwhelming, underperforming, inconsistent Liverpool will somehow recover and snatch it from them.
Why? Because things like that happen to Everton.
Even when they did somehow scrape the final Champions League place in 2005, they ended up crashing out in the preliminaries.
Everton being Everton, they were inevitably drawn against the only other decent team forced to jump through the hoops, Villarreal, and they lost when they had a perfectly good goal disallowed.
I don't know how the Goodison Park faithful manage to get up in the morning, I really don't.
It was happening again at the weekend when they were denied a perfectly good goal by Sepp Blatter's Offside Clarification of 2004.
Andy Johnson, who scored when he was onside by a comfortable margin, saw his goal ruled out because he was deemed offside.
The problem, you see, was that Johnson was offside when the move started, but was deemed to be onside because he wasn't interfering with play.
Then, when he was onside, he was deemed to be offside, because it was the second phase and despite being offside, but onside, for the first phase, he was onside, but actually offside for the second.
Thanks for clarifying that, Sepp. Keep up the good work.
Manchester City were cheated out of a win by this magnificent 'clarification' at Christmas and I said at the time that nothing at all would change until it happened to a superpower.
Everton have regular attendances of 40,000, they have millions of fans across the world, they have a trophy cabinet filled with silverware and one of the brightest managers in the game. Will anything happen? Of course it won't. It's Everton.
It is so toe-curlingly frustrating to know that, at some point in the near future, Liverpool or Manchester United are going to be eliminated from the Champions League through one of these decisions and the whole world is going to rise up as one and demand a change to this ludicrous rule.
The rest of us, who have seen such a thing on the horizon for months, will have no recourse, but to bang our heads repeatedly against the nearest wall.
One thought for anyone reading this and still thinking, 'Oh yeah, but it's only Everton and it's only one game, it's not important, is it?'
Everton are one point ahead of Liverpool in the table. If Andy Johnson's goal had counted, they'd be three points ahead.
If Everton qualify for the Champions League, it could be the platform that propels their club and their incredibly patient, long-suffering fans into the big-time.
If, because of this, they miss out by a single point, how important would it be then?
As I say, I'm so glad that I'm a Southend fan.

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