Stoke So Often Sets Path To Success For EvertonWhy victory over Potters has been a good omen for Blues.For a long while Everton and Stoke were operating on entirely different planes.
When the Blues won a barmy game 3-2 in the Potteries back in September 2008, the occasion marked the resumption of a rivalry that had lain dormant for more than 23 years.
That protracted period without a league meeting between the sides was interrupted only by an FA Cup tie at the Britannia Stadium.
A crucial third-round clash, as it happened – with Alan Stubbs’s arrowing free-kick seeing off then third-tier Stoke and providing some succour for his team following a run of five successive Premier League defeats.
The Potters, in fact, occupy their own little place in Everton folklore. It was January 1984 when the Blues had last been paired with the Staffordshire club in the FA Cup, 18 years prior to that Stubbs-inspired success.
And just like Walter Smith’s side in 2002, Howard Kendall’s Everton of the day did not travel to Stoke in the rudest of health.
They were hardly pulling up any trees in the league – one win in their previous six, and that against doomed Birmingham City – and Kendall was under the pump.
Despite their side’s less than propitious form – and in a forerunner for events nearly two decades later – legions of Evertonians descended on Stoke for this third-round tie.
“That’s your team talk today. Don’t let those fans down.”
Those words represented the extent of Kendall’s pithy but inspired message to his players, seconds after he had swung open the dressing room windows inside the Potters’ charming old Victoria Ground, to be met by a wall of noise being created by the travelling Blues.
Andy Gray and Alan Irvine both scored after half-time, Everton won 2-0 – and four months later Kendall had masterminded the Toffees’ first FA Cup triumph in 18 years.
Indeed, Stoke seemed to pop up around every corner during the initial phase of Everton’s mid-1980s renaissance.
The Blues most recently started a season against Stoke in that 1983-84 campaign, when Graeme Sharp, still striving to prove his worth to the denizens of Goodison Park, scored the game’s only goal.
And one week after disposing of the Potters in that subsequent fabled FA Cup encounter, Kendall’s team was back at the Victoria Ground to grind out a 1-1 draw, which proved the launchpad for a climax to the season that saw Everton beaten only three times in 19 matches.
Fifteen months later – in April 1985 – the Toffees repeated their 2-0 success at Stoke, this time in the league – a victory which constituted one-tenth of a heady winning streak that ended with Kendall landing the Club’s first league title since 1970.
But as the Blues re-established themselves among the country’s elite clubs, Stoke slipped towards their nadir, flitting between the second and third tiers – before scrapping back to the top table.
Indeed, scrapping, combative, rugged, gutsy and physical all constituted bywords for Stoke as they gained a foothold back in the Premier League, until a latter day, subtle refinement under Mark Hughes.
All those terms, actually, could be applied to the manner in which Everton ensured they emerged with three points from this fixture last season.
The Blues’ 1-0 victory was secured by an aptly scruffy goal, Leighton Baines’s penalty (pictured above) being diverted over the line by Shay Given’s head, after the goalkeeper had saved left-back Baines’s initial effort from 12 yards.
Rather than being a match that will be remembered for any particular thrills and spills, it will forever be etched in history as being the event of new boss Ronald Koeman’s first Premier League win at Goodison.
It was plain from this moment that Koeman had the smarts to read the rhythm and temperature of any given game, and chisel out a positive result accordingly – a quality, you suspect, born of a lifetime’s worth of winning; and winning the serious pots, to boot.
The Blues employed the same cussedness to get the job done against Watford, on their valedictory Goodison outing last term.
Between times, though, there was some scintillating stuff. Koeman’s side put four goals on Manchester City, did the same to Hull and Leicester, and sent away Southampton and West Bromwich nursing three-goal defeats. Bloodied Arsenal’s noses and hit Bournemouth for six, too.
Everton ultimately claimed 43 points from the 57 available at home during the Dutchman’s debut season at the helm – and proved there is more than one way to skin a cat in the process.
Typically, though, it has needed something from the more pragmatic playbook to get the better of Stoke.
Tim Cahill scored a header – naturally – to settle matters when the teams renewed acquaintances back in 2008, months after Stoke’s promotion. Everton won the return clash 3-1.
Subsequently, however, of the sides’ 16 Premier League meetings, 13 have been either drawn or settled by a single goal either way.
Nevertheless, when the Blues have spied a crack in Stoke’s customarily teak-tough rearguard, they have gone to town on them – winning 4-0 early in the exhilarating 2013-14 campaign, and inflicting a 3-0 defeat on Hughes’s’ side in February 2016, barely six weeks after coming out on the wrong end of a crazy, seven-goal, Goodison ding-dong.
That 4-3 win for Stoke was indicative of the finesse and adventure Hughes is trying to weld to his team’s familiar, pugnacious characteristics.
A reminder of the relentlessly ferocious challenge posed by the Premier League, too.
Everton have invested judiciously and ambitiously ahead of this latest renewal of the most glamorous competition in world football.
“A new chapter,” was how midfielder Morgan Schneiderlin described the forthcoming campaign in an interview with evertontv this week.
And it isn’t unknown for the story to have a happy ending when Stoke cross Everton’s path early in its narrative.
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