Everton’s sinking feeling and tales of their relegated forefathers

Say what you like about Everton, but they don’t get relegated very often, and when they do, they do it in style. In fact, they’ve only been sent down twice. In 1930, a mere two years after Dixie Dean’s 60-goal title-winning season, the Ev were relegated despite winning four of their last five games. They drew the other one, 3-3 at Manchester United, having been 3-1 to the good, dropping a point that would have kept them up. Then in 1951, their fate was sealed on the final day in a 6-0 humiliation at Sheffield Wednesday. “To abuse Everton at this stage,” wrote Donny Davies in Big Paper, “would be too much like picking up a person badly mauled from a street accident and reading him a lecture on the folly of jay-walking.” Talk about slyly putting the boot in. A drop-kicking, if you will.

Whether the current iteration of the Ev are quite as hopeless as those particular forefathers is a moot point, though Monday night’s 5-0 hammering at Tottenham doesn’t exactly help. It’s true that games between the two clubs are rarely predictable: Everton have won 5-4 and lost 6-2 at Goodison in recent years, while Tottenham’s all-time highest goal haul in the league came in a 10-4 win at White Hart Lane in Bill Nicholson’s first game in charge. (“It can only get worse,” a deadpan Danny Blanchflower told the new boss as he ambled off the pitch and down the tunnel, whistling insouciantly.) But this collapse has come at the worst possible time, with Everton one point above the relegation zone, and what would be only their fifth season out of the top flight since the league began in 1888 now a very real possibility.

“I have no problems with the challenge,” insisted Frank Lampard after this latest fiasco. That statement might not survive full