Standing proud and forthright with the great man’s right foot forward, the statue of Dixie Dean outside Goodison Park now finds itself pointing the way. With his back to the old place, Dixie is facing west towards the water, down to the site of a new home and a new beginning.
Everton are moving house and it feels like the right time. They are moving into something bright and shiny and new and absolutely necessary. Just as importantly, their intention is to leave something of their old self behind — something real and living — and it’s pertinent to ask why so many other English football clubs have not chosen to do the same.
Dean — a goal scorer of quite astonishing capacity — is arguably Everton’s greatest-ever player. He represented the club for 12 years and scored 383 goals in 433 appearances, a haul that included 37 hat-tricks.
His ashes, as it happens, were scattered on the pitch at Goodison Park when he died in 1980 at the age of 73. Other Everton greats rest there, too, along with more than 800 rank-and-file supporters. And this is one of the reasons it will be not be built upon when Everton leave at the end of this season.
When the site of Goodison Park is redeveloped to include some social housing, a community health centre and education hub, the area currently occupied by the playing surface will remain as a garden. On the artist’s impressions currently attached to what is called the Everton Legacy Project, it’s possible to make out the centre circle and it looks absolutely marvellous.
A statue of Everton legend Dixie Dean takes pride of place outside of Goodison Park
The record-breaking striker’s ashes were scattered on the pitch when he died in 1980 at the age of 73. Other Everton greats rest there, too
Some Everton supporters would like the club to go further. They wonder why some of Archibald Leitch’s ornate lattice iron work that adorns Goodison Park’s Bullens Road Stand is not being incorporated into plans for the redevelopment. The compromise is that a version of it will feature prominently at Everton’s new home two miles away at Bramley-Moore Dock.
And the truth of it is that it’s the pitch that really matters. If football is not about that beautiful and always-out-of-reach piece of green that lies at the heart of every club in the world, then what is it really about?
A friend of mine took his young daughter to her first game recently, at Bolton as it happens. He told me how her eyes lit up when she saw the playing surface for the first time. I have similar memories of visits to clubs in the North West in my own childhood. Through the turnstile, along the concourse, up the steps and there it was. A small patch of paradise.
So why have so many of our clubs cared so little about it? Why is so much of our national sport’s hallowed acreage now buried under concrete and bricks and mortar? It seems ugly, callous and wrong. If we don’t care about our game’s history and its forefathers then maybe we don’t really understand our game at all.
A version of Archibald Leith’s ornate lattice iron work that adorns Goodison Park’s Bullens Road Stand will feature prominently at Everton’s new Bramley Moore Dock home
Progress is inevitable and right and proper. A club that doesn’t move forwards in the modern age of state-owned football clubs and the rest is essentially going backwards.
When I took a quiet and nostalgic walk around the perimeter of Goodison before covering Liverpool’s Champions League game on Wednesday night, the only nod to a night of elite-level football taking place across the other side of Stanley Park was the fact a couple of the regular Everton car parks were being used to help soak up the traffic volume.
A club such as Everton — with a top-flight residency stretching back 70 years — should be front and central on nights like that one, not existing on the periphery with its nose pressed up against the glass.
This is why Everton are moving. They are moving because they have to in a bid to catch up, to reaquaint themselves with standards once set for themselves but long since lost. And this is why so many clubs have already done it. Progress has cost us some of our most much-loved football grounds. Eaten up by bulldozers. But none of that excuses what sometimes feels like a blatant disregard for all they once stood for.
Everton are not alone. The week before Manchester City’s treble-clinching Champions League win in Istanbul, I went back to the site of the old Maine Road for the very first time in two decades. The centre spot remains and so does the circle. It looked like it needed a clean but it was enough. I found myself standing there trying to work out where the old players’ tunnel must have been and, opposite that, the site of the old Kippax terrace. It felt special just to stand there and City are not, by the way, my team. Others have done likewise. Arsenal, for example.
The Toffees are leaving their famous stadium in the hope that it will enable them to bridge the gap to their Merseyside rivals Liverpool and other top English sides
The centre circle of the Maine Road stadium remains in the redeveloped area following Manchester City’s move to the Etihad
But then we have the other side of the coin. Stoke City’s Victoria Ground means something to me as I once worked in the town. I covered reserve games there. Once I sat and watched with some fascination as Brian Clough urged his son Nigel on from the Main Stand. Nigel was in Liverpool’s second string at the time.
I drove there recently and, save for a blue plaque on a new-build house and some street names named after players, you would not have known that once upon a time, on that cramped piece of real estate by a through road, greatness lived, breathed and worked. Sir Stanley Matthews. Gordon Banks. Gone. Wiped from view. I found it utterly dispiriting.
Not everybody can take the Everton road. Practicalities and realities come into play. Land has to be sold after all. But it is tempting to wonder just how hard some clubs have really tried. We are talking about an acre or so of grass. Not even that. A centre circle. A centre spot. A single mark left behind on a new landscape can mean everything.
Dixie Dean will be staying at Goodison, by the way. So will Colin Harvey, Alan Ball and Howard Kendall, immortalised in bronze round the corner on Goodison Road. Everton’s Community hub will also remain and that is another landmark immediately recognisable in Everton blue.
However, Stoke City’s Victoria Ground has been honoured by blue plaques that adorn new-build houses on the site
But it’s the green bit that matters. The grass. A place for mums and dads to take children, to sit them on a bench by the touchline and tell them what their club is really all about.
Gone but not forgotten. Absent but still present. This stuff matters perhaps more than many of us really know.
Stephens’ foul-mouthed tirade
Southampton are in a mess. They have one point from six games and are joint bottom of the Premier League as manager Russell Martin ploughs on with an intricate style of football that seems simply unsustainable.
And into the middle of that is now thrown a two-game ban for key central defender Jack Stephens.
Jack Stephens has been handed a £50,000 fine and an additional ban for his foul-mouthed tirade against match officials following his sending off against Man United last month
Having already missed three games after a sending off against Manchester United, Stephens will now sit out two more on the say so of the FA after it emerged he used the C-word three times towards the match officials on his way off the pitch.
The £50,000 fine will not trouble Stephens terribly but the extra suspension will. As well as feeling embarrassed and ashamed of his actions, the 30-year-old will now also be feeling guilty that he is not there when his team needs him most.
Southampton are at Arsenal on Saturday. I would make Stephens wash the kit.