Everton pre-season review

I watched my first live game of the new season at the weekend, Everton v PSV Eindhoven. It was the last pre-season game for Everton and they played pretty well overall, I was suitably impressed with our performance considering PSV are the current Dutch champions and will be playing in the Champions League this season. It also wasn’t a full strength team we put out, there were quite a few home grown players on show. Jack Rodwell impressed me the most, he had a solid game considering his age and looks like he could be a long term replacement for Lee Carsley.

The rest of our results in pre-season have been pretty poor really but I don’t pay much attention to pre-season results as I see the games as a chance to give the whole squad a run out and to try a few different formations.

Pre-season off the pitch hasn’t exactly gone to plan though. We’ve let quite a few players go and not brought anyone new in, while I was quite happy to let AJ go for the right money it looks like we didn’t get as much for him due to a previous injury. Our CEO resigned in mysterious circumstances, David Moyes still hasn’t signed a new contract yet and our plans for a new stadium have been called-in by the government. Quite an eventful few weeks. At the moment I’m worried there is something going on behind the scenes at the club and that worries me more than anything else!

Having said that I’m still optimistic about the new season. There is still time to bring in a few new players before the transfer deadline to help us solidify our position as a top 6 six team this year and hopefully all these off the field issues sort themselves out.

Roll on another 9 months of football!

Interest in AJ

There are rumours that Wigan & Sunderland are interested in buying Andy Johnson from Everton for about £10 million. If we could get around £12 million for him then I’d be very tempted to sell him. He had a great first year with us but last year was interrupted by injuries however we didn’t really miss him with the Yak, Jimmy & Vic all playing well. I also like Timmy playing up front so I don’t think we’d miss him and £12 million seems like a good deal for a player we paid for £8.6 million for 2 years ago.

While Moyes has said he’s not interested in selling I have a feeling he won’t be with Everton by the time the season starts.

Fantasy football 2007/2008 season review

Amazingly this was my first season of playing Fantasy Football of any kind, ever! I signed up to the official Premier League version and joined the league operated in work. My team name, Bullock’s Ballbags, aptly named considering where I finished up!

I started off slowly learning the rules the hard way by completely changing my team early on in the season and taking a big transfer points deduction on the few points I had gained so far! I didn’t know what the “wildcard” was at that point! As you’d expect Everton players formed the backbone of my team throughout the season.

My team slide down the league as did my dedication to the cause. However a few changes to the side at New Year got me moving up the leagueagain . Unfortunately I was too far gone to make any kind of a difference to the top of the table. I finished 19th in the league for work and 546,674th overall. I managed to steal that 19th place from a colleague on the last day of the season!

One thing playing fantasy football did this year was make me take more of an interest in the other games shown on MoTD apart from the Everton games!

Bring on 2008/2009!