Upwardly mobile Scottish manager establishing a reputation as
skilled team builder sends on two youngsters to defeat big-name
opponent. Remind you of anyone? David Moyes, a mini Sir Alex Ferguson,
lost Wayne Rooney to Manchester United but can still pull a wizard
from an academy.
First Dan Gosling, then Jack Rodwell: Moyes reached into Everton's own heritage of home
cultivation to inflict a sixth Premier League defeat on United. This
on a day when the barnstorming Rooney seemed temporarily to have
run out of gas. On the ground where he burst out of Croxteth as a
pugnacious 16-year-old with hellfire eyes, Rooney surrendered the
limelight for an afternoon to Gosling, 20, and Rodwell, an
18-year-old from the golfing town of Birkdale who looks a certainty
to wear full England colours.
Gosling's tap-in was a routine finish after a piercing
first-half drive from Diniyar Bilyaletdinov had nullified Dimitar
Berbatov's opener for the guests. But Rodwell subverted that United
trademark, the audacity of youth, to gather the ball 30 yards out
and set off on a diagonal goal-scoring trot that was redolent of
another England striker and boyhood Everton fan, now in United's
ranks.
To compare Rodwell's fourth goal in blue to Michael Owen's
against Argentina at the 1998 World Cup would be to invite the
attentions of the hyperbole police. Yet the late teenage years
confer a free-spiritedness that older players know only from their
scrapbooks.
Rodwell, a rangy, elegant, athletic midfielder who is tipped by
some to end up as a centre-back, might have had consolidation on
his mind as Everton led the English champions by Gosling's goal
with only a minute left of regular time. But football's brightest
boys don't think that way. They aim not to close games down but to
change their outcomes. So Rodwell ran at another highly-regarded
youngster – Jonny Evans – befuddling the United defender with the
angle of his run. He then fired right-to-left past Edwin van der
Sar to put the game beyond United's scampering reach.
In not much more than a month Everton have conquered Manchester
City, Chelsea, Sporting Lisbon and now United. No wonder Moyes
said: "Everton as a football club is going places." Most impressive
is his talent for blending home-developed colts with cast-offs from
bigger clubs while also taking calculated gambles on foreign
talent.
Their starting line-up included three mainstays who had fallen
fractionally below United's higher standards or, in Louis Saha's
case, had become too infirm to persevere with. Saha, who scored
both in last week's 2-1 win over Chelsea, has menaced centre-halves
every time he has shown up fit. Ask Evans and Wes Brown, United's
second-choice pairing in the absence of Nemanja Vidic and Rio
Ferdinand. Tim Howard and Phil Neville are the other United
discards who have flourished at Goodison Park.
Excursions into the foreign talent market usually come off for
Moyes. Bilyaletdinov applies his ability patchily but is blessed
with creativity and struck an exquisite equaliser that made a
statue of Van der Sar. Landon Donovan, David Beckham's colleague at
Los Angeles' Home Depot Centre, has taken to Premier League combat
with great verve. "Landon said he had the flu. I told him – people
from Los Angeles don't get flu," Moyes said. Donovan sprinted
around demonically without calling once for a hankie.
But as clubs strive to survive the economic winter there is no
greater pleasure than finding a match-winner among the fresh faces
of the academy. Gosling (technically a Plymouth Argyle graduate)
and Rodwell came on for Bilyaletdinov and Pienaar respectively and
injected the extra energy needed to counteract the arrivals of Paul
Scholes for Berbatov and Gabriel Obertan for Park Ji-sung, whose
industry disguised his innocuousness.
"We knew Dan Gosling's got a goal in him and Jack was making up
for a small mistake he made in midweek," Moyes said. The Everton
manager thinks the club's best young hope since Rooney is still too
raw to be effective as a holding midfielder: "I think for now he's
better doing what he did today and breaking on. His size says he
must be a defensive midfielder but what he did today is what he is.
He's got good composure and technique but there are other things he
needs to add to his game."
Lurking in that assessment might be discouragement for potential
predators, United included. It would be depressing for Everton's
supporters to imagine Old Trafford taking Rooney and Rodwell while
Howard and a fragile Saha come the other way. Losing Rooney, an
inevitability given Everton's inability to match United's rates of
pay, was bound to make Moyes more wary of over-promoting the club's
own local discoveries.
Whatever the stresses of talent-retention, this is an impressive
Everton side who can also call on Tim Cahill, Marouane Fellaini and
Phil Jagielka. There is a debate to be had now about which side of
Stanley Park is the rosier. Liverpool have more assets but much
greater debt. Everton have stability and evolutionary force. And
they have Moyes.