Everton summon up all their reserves to preserve a 69th top-flight season

Everton were staring relegation for the first time in decades in the face at half-time against Crystal Palace, but they had been there before.

Well, somehow or other, they did it. It would be a stretch to say Everton turned into a great team during the second half of their match against Crystal Palace. They absolutely, definitely didn’t. But when it really hit the fan, when preparation became a fading memory, the muscle memory found a way of kicking in and they muddled through. For the 69th consecutive season, Everton, the Grand Old Team, will be a top-flight club. And while they’ve cut it finer than this before, the sense of relief when the final whistle blew will have felt just as satisfying.

To say that Goodison Park was up for the occasion would be something of an understatement. Before the match outside the ground, an ostentatious greeting for the players and plumes of blue smoke. Inside, the slightly discordant tones of the theme music to Z-Cars have seldom sounded more dystopian, with the swelling urgency of the crowd enveloping it as the players took to the pitch. Older Everton supporters have been to even greater extremities than this before. On the last days of both the 1994 and 1998 seasons, the Toffees took to the Goodison Park turf on the last day of the season with the Premier League’s trapdoor starting to move beneath their feet. On both occasions, they had just about enough about them to get what they needed. This time around, there was still a game to spare afterwards, but away to Arsenal was hardly a fixture Everton could expect to claim a result from. The volume of the crowd was a tacit reminder that everybody knew as such.

For 22 minutes, that noise didn’t seem to let up. Crystal Palace seemed to have