“I’m very sad for him because he saved Everton football club last season under difficult circumstances. He was still doing as good a job as could be expected of him. Remember, they're the lowest spending team in the league and have been for a while. There’s been the change of stadium, there’s been no money to spend, the ownership was a mess for such a long time, he’s had no leadership.
“Yet, he still managed to steer the club through. He's done an incredible job for Everton. Then you go through a wee dip and you get sacked,” Nevin tells Tribalfootball. But while he’s sad to see Dyche go, he has no qualms about it happening three hours before kick-off on matchday.
“As a chief executive I've been in situations with managers and these are complex things. We want it to be a simple yes or no problem but it’s always more complicated than that. I would imagine the new owners have come in, looking forward to the future and I suspect Sean Dyche might have given them an absolute reality check, as he tends to do. As opposed to sugarcoating it.
“A new American owner wants to hear, ‘yeah, we're going to win’, instead of ‘we've not got the depth of squad, we haven't got anywhere near what we need’. I’m speculating of course, but if you don't see the same way going forward then you should part ways immediately. It's like a bad marriage. It's not going to work, it's just going to make it painful for everybody,” Nevin elaborates while being optimistic about the future of Dyche.
“He'll be fine. Firefighters are deeply, deeply loved in the English game. Remember what he did last year at Everton, which may be one of the greatest escapes ever. Remember what he did at Burnley. Getting a team up from the Championship? He's done that. These are specialist qualities that are wanted, so he'll be okay.”
A manager in the making at 15
David Moyes will make his return to Goodison Park, 12 years after he left for Manchester United which brought a smile to Pat Nevin’s face.
“I was looking around thinking, I really could only see one or two people that might be able to do a similar or perhaps even a little bit better job. Fortunately, one of them was David Moyes,” Nevin states, but is Moyes better at getting the best from “The Toffees” than Dyche?
“David Moyes is one of the most experienced managers in Premier League football. He clearly did a decent job at West Ham. He clearly did, for a long period of time, a fabulous job at Everton and under strained circumstances. So, Moyes can do it. He's got history there. You need somebody who can come in and doesn't have to find out what's going on. He needs to get to work right away and understand everything.
“Is he better technically? I don't know if we can say that but he's slightly different. The defensive side is already set and it's fine that you don't actually need to adapt a great deal other than a little bit more creativity. That's going to be the tough bit.
“To some degree Moyes and Dyche are not utterly dissimilar but where some people see that as a negative, I see that as a positive. If you bring in somebody who wants to go and play total football, playing out from the back and taking risks and chances they will get relegated. So, the owners probably did the right thing by getting what they think is a minor upgrade to get that little bounce that might be enough to see them through. Because it'll come down to two or three points,” the current BBC pundit believes.
Nevin turned out 138 times for Everton and remains optimistic on theirs and David Moyes’ behalf, while admitting to a certain bias.
“I hold my hand up. I do love the club and desperately want them to stay up, but my bias isn't just for Everton FC. David Moyes and I have been friends since I was 14. We played in the same boys' club together in Glasgow,” Nevin reveals, remembering clearly an early rollocking he received from a young “Moysie”.
“He was the captain in the under-15s and he'd come to watch our under-14s where I was centre-forward. I scored a couple of goals in the first half, but I jumped out of a tackle because these two hammer throwers were trying to kill me. As I walked off, this red-headed centre-back of our under-15s stood there shouting at me going, ‘never ever do that again, how dare you do that, you're a disgrace to this club, now they know that you fear them, never ever do it again’.
“You could have stamped ‘MGR’ across his forehead because it couldn't have been any clearer that this guy was a manager in the making. He was always somebody who was respected and always somebody who I knew cared more about everybody else and the team ethic than himself. I've known Davy that long and I absolutely trust him to get the best out of those players.”
- Pat Nevin was talking to Tribalfootball on behalf of talkSPORT BET