Tomorrow night Everton host Dinamo Bucharest, hoping to overturn a 5-1 deficit. In all likelihood it'll be our last stint in Europe for a while, but if we do manage the impossible we'll need two things to happen.
Firstly, an early goal. Football is all about momentum, and the best managers are those who stop ruts before they develop, and know how to sustain ones that do. Moyes seems willing to overlook recent results on account of our good performances - the assumption being that if we keep plucking away the rewards will come. Unfortunately that's a bad strategy, because before you now it 5 games have passed and you're bottom of the league. A good manager knows when we're dipping below the results that we need, and takes action.
To be fair to Davie he is changing things around. Not radically, but he's not persisting with the same forward line. We'd all like to see a return to 442, but to abandon it without the right personnel would be wrong. I don't think for a minute that David Moyes is as unconcerned about recent results than he's making out, and I praise him for that. Most football fans expect managers to act the same in public as they do behind closed doors. They think that football clubs should be transparent, since we the fans deserve honesty. We do, but public information can undermine efforts to reform. The best strategy for Moyes is to keep fans calm, claim all is well, divert any question of "crisis", whilst working to buggery behind closed doors at changing things around.
Tim Cahill, Marcus Bent, Leon Osman and Simon Davies have all looked capable of scoring this season. We're not firing on all cylinders, but there's a lot of pent up aggression in this team. If we can score an early goal I have confidence that there are at least 4 goals in this team.
So to win, we need an early goal. 2-0 at halftime, and anythings possible. That should be the aim.
But breaking through our goal-shyness requires another major factor: the crowd. When Goodison Park rocks it's inspirational and unique. Which is why we need a full house. The club, however, have incurred much wrath for having refused to sell tickets on the night, and kept them at the standard price of £25. Understandably there's a consensus among those who've yet to decide whether to go, that prices should be slashed to ensure a packed stadium.
The problem is that thousands of tickets have already been sold, and have been sold for £25. If the currently unsold tickets are reduced to £10 we might get twice as many fans, but those who've already spent £25 will be rightly annoyed that they've had to pay more. The solution might be to refund the difference, but £15 for every ticket sold is a hell of a lot of money for the club to refund. And this is the transitional gains trap. We can all see that starting from right now, we're better off if the club reduces prices. Unfortunately they've already sold a ticket worth £25, and those who bought them will want to protect the value of that purchase.
Similarly, we might look at the taxicab medallions. When the government handed out the rights to own and operate a taxi, it probably seemed pretty innocuous. But over time those medallions, and the right that they represent became valuable - due to a restriction in the supply of taxis. Forget what you learned at A-level economics that a monopoly is a single firm, a monopoly is the restriction of new entrants into an industry. So it might seem to make sense now to liberalise the taxi industry, and allow new entrants, but those with medallions would be willing to pay up to the value of their medallion (about $300,000 for NYC) to block such reforms. And who ultimately benefits? Well not even the medallion holders, since they'd have had to buy it at the market rate, and hence only earn normal profits.
So the granting of a certain rights can come back to bite you. An institutional barrier can prevent good ideas from being implemented, and should make us very wary of granting exclusive access to various streams of income.
As for Everton, they should just give fans that already have a ticket an extra one for free, and let them sell it on.
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