EVERTON

‘I wish I’d bought Everton.’

SYLVESTER STALLONE in the Liverpool Echo

‘I support them both, but if it comes to the crunch,

I’m an Evertonian.’

SIR PAUL McCARTNEY in Observer Sport

As a child, I felt a strange affinity with Everton fans. It was that shared feeling that somehow they too had picked the wrong team in the city to support.

Everton fans, even Rocky and a Beatle, have it worse than we do. They are a true giant of a football club, yet any success they have is always viewed through the prism of the team on the other side of Stanley Park. Their biggest rivals are actually named after the city, and outsiders usually make the mistake of assuming that all Scousers will support Liverpool. Although my theory is that the more stereotypical a Scouser looks and sounds, the more likely he will be to support the reds.

And that brings me to something that genuinely used to really annoy me on behalf of Everton fans. As you may have gathered, I love football kits. We got our first colour TV in 1973 – bear with me – a brooding monster of a rented box that permanently smelled as though a forest fire was about to begin. But finally I had the chance to see football on TV in glorious colour, and technology being what it was back then, it was COLOUR. Not the mundane shades of actual real life but vibrant, garish colour, the sort even Walt Disney may find a tad bright. To a generation of children brought up with Brian Moore saying ‘for those of you watching in black and white, Leicester City are wearing the slightly darker socks’, this was like the actual future arriving in your front room, albeit a future that may contain a small explosion from the back of the telly.

My favourite TV watching position as a kid was horizontal on the carpet with my face about a foot from the screen; left hand available to reach for fizzy drinks, right hand permanently occupied in twiddling my hair. Apparently, I looked really cute.

Less cute is the fact that, even in my fifties, it still is the way I watch television – horizontal on the carpet with my face about a metre from the screen; left hand available to reach for pinot grigio, right hand permanently occupied in twiddling what’s left of my hair. I still refuse to accept that my receding hairline and short-sightedness had anything to do with the way I spent most of my childhood.

The TV set was delivered on a Monday afternoon, which meant I had six long days and five long nights to wait before 10 p.m. on Saturday found me lying on the carpet, twiddling my hair, desperately willing Match of the Day to come on.

Finally, the moment came, heralded by the second greatest theme tune in the world:* it was time for my first glimpse of TV football in colour, and it was Everton at home. The opponents I don’t remember, but the kit I do. It was the most glorious, vivid, royal blue with a white collar, and white shorts.

I loved it. I loved it so much that I became furiously indignant on their behalf whenever a commentator would bang on about Liverpool’s famous and traditional all-red kit (which wasn’t that traditional; they’d only been wearing it since 1964). Liverpool were always ‘resplendent’ in their red. No one else got to be ‘resplendent’. ‘Resplendent’ means sumptuous, magnificent through colour, impressive. Just say red, for Christ’s sake.

Anyhoo, it didn’t seem to bother Evertonians as much as it bothered me because relations between the red and blue were generally very good, or at least they were until the Premier League came along and made winning so much more bloody important.

Apart from the kit, there is something else I … blimey, I nearly said ‘like’ then … there is something else I don’t mind about Everton, and that’s Goodison Park. Along with Selhurst Park, it’s one of the last proper grounds in the Premier League. And by ‘proper’, I mean old-fashioned, slightly shabby and worlds away from the identikit corporate stadiums that pass as grounds around the rest of the top division. It’s a proper throwback. The stand behind the goal is called the Gwladys Street End, how old-fashioned and badly spelt is that?

Incidentally, fact fans, when that end was opened in 1937, Everton became the first club to have four double-decker stands. It would have happened years earlier but one resident of Gwladys Street, Private William Fraser, refused to leave his house so it could be knocked down. In the end, Everton bunged him £25 to bugger off, and, amazed by such riches, bugger off he did.

The Toffees have always had a quirky history. The Toffees?! Oh, haven’t I mentioned that yet? Like many club nicknames and traditions there are as many versions of how it happened as there are blokes in a pub willing to tell you, but this one seems closest. Around 1890, a sweetshop owner called Old Ma Bushell became famous for inventing Everton Toffees. Her shop was next door to Anfield, where Everton then played, wearing red shirts. The club then moved to Goodison Park, which was good news for Mother Noblett,* who promptly invented Everton Mints as a tribute to their new kit of black and white stripes. Nothing daunted, Old Ma Bushell asked permission from the club to distribute free toffees to fans inside the ground before the match started. Which is why her granddaughter began chucking toffees at bemused men who were apparently charmed by the idea of a free sweet in the eye after a week of hard graft in the docks. It’s a tradition that persists to this day, unlike the dock, unfortunately.

But there was a day when you could have thrown free cars to fans pre-match and they wouldn’t have noticed. On 14 January 2007, amid rumours that he was about to buy the club, Sylvester Stallone was guest of honour at Everton v Reading, and my editor at Match of the Day 2 decided that was the game I should cover. I objected, because (a) that’s my default setting, and (b) I was convinced that the whole Sly/Rocky thing was old news and that a once-iconic figure would barely raise an eyebrow in more cynical times. And I was right, no one raised an eyebrow. They raised a roof. In fact, they raised all four of them, including Gwladys. Why do they spell it like that?

I turned up with my camera crew and a full-size cardboard cut-out of Sylvester Stallone. Now, before the match, his appearance was still only a rumour, but the sight of me prancing around with a cardboard boxer was enough to get a lot of people very excited (dear God, I had to keep a tight grip on that cut-out … and that’s a sentence you don’t get to use often).

Despite local excitement, I was still slightly underwhelmed by the whole thing until, taking my place in the press box, the match announcer’s voice came over loud and clear: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have a very special guest here at Goodison Park today’, and without saying any more played the opening bars of the Rocky theme tune.

I have never seen a football stadium wobble before, but the ensuing noise was off the scale, as a stocky little real-life, actual Sylvester Stallone appeared. The players stopped kicking about and formed an impromptu guard of honour as he came on the pitch and Sly shadow-punched his way around the stadium to the disbelief and delirium of the entire crowd.

Now this put me in a dilemma. First, I was going to have to tell my editor he was right in the first place, which really annoyed me. Second, I, along with 15 other journalists, had been granted a whole minute with Sylvester and, curmudgeon that I am, my one question was basically going to be how nice it must be for him to get out of the house for a change, so I needed a new one, fast.

Then things got even better, or worse, depending on your perspective. The chairman of Everton at the time was the very nice, very generous Bill Kenwright, and when I interviewed him pre-match, he hinted he had laid on a little surprise for me.

Cut to half-time and I’m in the queue to get my minute with Rocky. Suddenly, out of his entourage loomed a big man. A very big man. Big enough to have his own postcode. In a perfect movie New York accent, he asked if I was Kevin Day. I gulped, then nodded. He beckoned. And I found myself in the company of a real-life version of my cardboard cut-out, albeit about a foot shorter.

Sylvester Stallone himself, sounding exactly like Rocky, said that ‘Mr Kenwright’ had told him I did features on TV with ‘the real blue-collar fans’. I was happy to agree, even though I knew my next feature was going to be in an executive box at Spurs.

‘I like that,’ said Sly. ‘No one talks to the blue-collar fans any more’, and then proceeded to give me a perfect eight-minute analysis of the way sport was being priced out of the reach of ordinary working people.

None of the other proper journalists even got to ask a question, and to make it even better, Adrian Chiles was hosting Match of the Day 2 at the time, so for the first and only time in my life I had a legitimate reason to shout: ‘Adri-an’.

Why You Shouldn’t Support Them

■ One of the buggers stole the cardboard cut-out.

■ They can’t spell ‘Gladys’.

■ The new owner is planning to build an identikit corporate stadium.