Yahoo News Everton points deduction: Premier League have gone to unheard place with 'heightened risk' claim
Along with glancing up from a laptop screen when putting the finishing touches to some quickly amended half-time player ratings to catch Dominic Calvert-Lewin’s effort sail into the Park End goal in the corner of my eye, the enduring image of Everton’s first Premier League win of 2024 for this correspondent was seeing Neville Southall back at Goodison Park.
After 96 minutes of nerves as the teams grappled with conditions that former Blues winger Gerard Deulofeu might describe as “very very wind,” I surveyed the scene in front of the Press Box and there was the former Wales international posing for a photograph with a fan in the Main Stand. I captured the image myself and tweeted: “At least the great Neville Southall was able to smile at the end of this one as Everton won at last.”
While Kevin Sheedy was my boyhood idol in terms of the outfield players, ‘Big Nev’ was my other favourite and everyone of my generation who followed football was in awe of the Everton goalkeeper who was the best player in the world in his position, including Kopites. Steven Gerrard admitted to having an Everton goalkeeper shirt and declared in 2006: “I loved Southall. When I didn’t fancy playing out, I donned my goalie kit and pretended I was Southall.”
READ MORE: Premier League rival says Everton points deduction 'doesn't fit the crime' and 'should be greater'
From the awakening of my football consciousness through to beyond my 18th birthday, Southall was at Everton and, along with turning out more times for the Blues than anyone else (751 appearances), he is also the club’s most-decorated player with two League Championships, two FA Cups and a European Cup-Winners’ Cup. Despite this unparalleled legacy, Nev’s straight talking has ensured that he hasn’t always been a welcome guest with Goodison Park chiefs in recent years, though, so it was refreshing to see him back at his spiritual home and the site of some of his best work.
Hopefully it will also help pave the way for the statue of Southall that so many Evertonians have advocated to be built at the new stadium to be seriously considered by those within the club’s corridors of power, whether that ends up being 777 Partners or not. Almost 39 years on from when Howard Kendall’s heroes clinched the title with five games to spare, finishing 13 points clear of Liverpool – a record margin at the time – Southall remains the last of four goalkeepers to win the Football Writers’ Association Footballer of the Year.
The other three, tellingly all have their own statues: Pat Jennings (1972/73); Gordon Banks (1971/72) and Bert Trautmann (1955/56). It is Trautmann whom we turn our attentions to next.
In the same season he collected that individual gong, he helped his club Manchester City to beat Birmingham City 3-1 in the FA Cup final despite being knocked unconscious 17 minutes from the end of the game when colliding with opponent Peter Murphy’s knee, with the Duke of Edinburgh commenting on the crooked state of his neck a later medical examination revealing he had broken a bone. For his bravery, Trautman also received a rendition of “For he’s a jolly good fellow” from the crowd as the players left the Wembley pitch, but it was a far cry from the abuse he received from spectators when he first played on these shores a few years earlier.
Born in Bremen in 1923, Trautmann served as a paratrooper for the Third Reich in the Second World War, fighting for three years on the Eastern Front, earning five medals, including an Iron Cross. As the war drew to a close, Trautmann was sent to the Western Front and as one of only 90 soldiers in his thousand-man regiment to survive, he was captured by the British and sent to a POW camp in Ashton-in-Makerfield.
Refusing an offer of repatriation, following his release in 1948, he worked on a farm while playing for St Helens Town, catching the eye of Manchester City scouts. The club’s decision to sign a former volunteer soldier of Nazi Germany sparked protests with 20,000 people attending a demonstration but over time, through his performances and the way he conducted himself on the pitch, Trautmann won the British public over.
People clearly came to the conclusion that it was unfair to make blanket assumptions. Which brings us to the disturbing revelations detailed in paragraph 212 of the report on Everton’s latest PSR case.
The Independent Commission write: “Further, we reject the Premier League’s submission that Everton should not have placed “all its eggs in one basket”, and that Everton should have been aware that Mr Usmanov had a heightened risk profile. That is a nice point to be made in hindsight, as was the Premier League’s invocation of the Russian invasion of the Crimea and the Russian poisoning episodes on UK soil.
“It is, in the Commission’s view, too much to ask that Everton should have taken these matters into account with respect to the prudent management of the sponsorship risk.”
While Usmanov might not be Father Christmas and has subsequently been sanctioned by the UK, EU and USA due to links with the Kremlin, it is quite the jump by the Premier League to include Putin’s annexation of Crimea a decade ago and the use of the Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury in the same sentence as the Blues’ commercial strategies.
The Premier League’s claims that Everton should have been planning ahead because of these events are going to a level and a place that is unheard of. Such suggestions were sensibly dismissed by the panel.
The coup de grace though comes in the irony that despite Goodison Park chiefs voluntarily suspending their agreement with Usmanov’s USM company in March 2022, the Premier League – who have now recommended that Everton be deducted a total of 17 points this season – continued to take their money from Russian broadcasters for a further two months before finally pulling the plug.
No wonder so many fans of both the Blues and other clubs have lost all faith in Richard Masters and company when it comes to keeping their own house in order and what feels like a desperate bid to avoid genuinely independent regulation.
