* Once again we need the help of the Bluekipper faithful. We were unable to get tickets in the away end on saturday, so ended up in the main stand behind the Everton bench. On Saturday Fellaini was given a rest and joined Moyesie & Co on the bench. As the son of Sausage, it was heartbreaking to watch my old man watching his long lost love child, jogging up and down the touchline, wig bouncing... So at the end of the match we went over to the bench, as Fellaini got up I called him over. At first he looked a little puzzled to see a man with a wig almost as big as his stood in front of him. But to his credit he came over. And there they were....the two biggest wigs on Merseyside, side by side, father and son finally re-united, posing for the cameras for the first time!! Unfortunately our camera man fucked up, and the photo didn't come out! However, Fellaini being the top man that he is, stood there for a little while, whilst the camera man tried in vain. But there were loads of toffee men around us, taking photos at the same time and someone must have caught this historic moment?!! So if anyone was there on saturday and got the photo of Sausage and Fellaini could they please email it to Bluekipper? Thanks, G.

IF ANY EVERTON FAN WANTS TO WRITE A REPORT OF ANY OF THIS SEASON'S GAMES, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO DO SO. JUST E-MAIL IT TO info@bluekipper.com AND WE WILL PUT IT HERE.

SMALLVILLE, UK By Mickey Blue Eyes.

It was 3rd January 2009. Time again for the FA Cup Third Round. Time for layers of thermals, nerves of steel and a testing of super powers. Our opponents were Macclesfield Town of League Two of the Football League. If the last thirteen seasons of the Cup were an accurate guide we were in for a hard time. After all, our Cup performance for that period has been as useful as the proverbial chocolate fire guard. Every man and his dog have beaten Us. It was a sobering thought. Despite this, I love the FA Cup more than any other knock-out competition. For me it is the very roots of the game, a short break from the administrative muck that pervades the modern league set-up. Which made it all the more contemptible when the English Football Association – of all people – allowed Mancs Inc. to avoid entry some seasons ago in favour of a misbegotten tournament somewhere on an asteroid. The same contempt goes for any club or media hack that treats it as a minor competition. But good fans know this.
Everyone has their share of Cup stories. My favourite concerns our inglorious loss a few years ago to Shrewsbury Town at their old Gay Meadow ground. (Don’t you just love that name? However, since 2007 they play at a much better new ground named either New Meadow or the Prostar Stadium, whichever you choose. I wonder why they got rid of the word “Gay”?). The score was 1-1, a few minutes to go, when the Shrews got a right side free kick tight in the corner. I muttered to Tommy, “Be a bad time to let one in this, Tom.” The ball came over, we fucked up the clearance and they scored what was obviously going to be a winner. Tommy did a complete Krakatoa East of Java number in rich Caledonian, along the lines of, “It Was All Yirr Fuckn Fault Ye Absolute Fuckn Twatn Idiot Ye.” He wasn’t kidding either. He was inconsolable. I have felt guilty about it ever since, as all proper fans do. As I looked around at our deflated legions I decided there is no sadder sight in the world than the meshuga fans decorations of a painted face and periwig, with the possible exception of an exotic dancer on a wet Monday in a seedy pub in decaying downtown Dagenham. Shrewsbury went out of the Football League at the end of that season, though they bounced back quickly. Mind you, that pales into insignificance at the thought of Newcastle’s exit over thirty years ago at the hands of then non-league Hereford United. Occasionally a Geordie friend of mine has to go on business through the scene of that disaster. He tells me he waits till he gets to the town centre, then winds the window down and shouts, “Fuck off!” even now. You can get pretty raw when it comes to the Cup........THE Cup. Which is why it is treasured. Remember Barnsley last season?

Macclesfield is the English equivalent of America’s fictional Smallville. Macclesfield Town FC is down there in League Two in fourteenth place having conceded forty-seven goals, the worst in the four divisions. Surely we couldn’t fail to score.........could we? But were they the rural footy equivalent of Clark Kent? Were we to be cast as Lex Luther and would we need Kryptonite? On Saturday we set out to answer these vital questions. En route to the game I realised with a start that I had never been to Macclesfield. Knowing nothing about the town I was unsure what to expect. I had this city-boy vision of a sort of small, Herefordesque market town in sleepy east Cheshire, with smock-wearing peasants lounging against the village stocks and slurping tankards of bootleg soider while talking sheep auctions. Preceding days were full of charming, old-fashioned stories of how their fans tried to make the pitch playable in the face of freezing weather. It revived memories of braziers, straw and piled-up snow at pitch-side. The club itself only gained league status eleven years ago and was managed for a spell by Paul Ince, who then got enticed to Blackburn, who then sacked him after four months in the job – proof, if it was needed, that something in the game is decidedly cockamamie. Given the differences between the two clubs you could be forgiven for thinking we would walk it. But the last thirteen seasons has made us more than a bit world-weary. Our reality in the FA Cup is that we have become the new Newcastle. Moreover, Tommy sat in front of me on The Bus and I expected him to say, “Yew open yirr mouth like ye did against Shrewsbury an’ I’ll fuckn deck ye.” But he was with his grandson and therefore on his best behaviour. Taken together this was a set of match circumstances ripe with.........what? Irony? Stereotypes? Giant-killing (which is acceptable only when you aren’t a victim)? Woolyback chutzpah?

Wikipedia tells us Macclesfield Town FC was founded in 1874, officially four years BEFORE Everton. Prior that they were a rugby club for twenty-odd years. They finally got into the Football League in 1997 after years of trying. But time passeth and hath no respect for English status: They were bought by Iraqis Bashar and Amar al Khadi in 2003 at the club’s League Two nadir, and now plan a move away to a new stadium. Their average attendance has never been more than about 3,300, usually nearer to 2,300. However, Macclesfield fans have demonstrated they have some intelligent and civilised individuals in their ranks. These are the very bed rock of the game. They have formed a Supporters Trust which Evertonians should not be too proud to look to as an example of what can be hoped and worked for when you use your natural intelligence instead of just your mouth and beer breath. (See:http://www.mtfc.co.uk/page/SilkmenSupportersTrust/0,,10393~1223389,00.html.)There are many other examples throughout the Football League and in the smaller part-time leagues. So the real spirit of the game is alive and well even in the current era of tenth-rate spivs and ale house paranoids.

There was another topic of conversation and much hilarity on The Bus. It was the overnight jailing of the pinky, Gerrard, after a few sherbets and an argument with a disc jockey in a Southport bar. The Bus of course ignored habeas corpus and said he was guilty by the fact of “bein’ a shite.” But the incident is unsurprising given how today’s weeny boppers, bless them, argue about their “music” (sic) and its attendant “culture” (sic). Mostly of course the “music” is dissonant twaddle whoever the crotch-grinding, performing shmuck might be, while the “culture” is an odd dilution of The Beano, Forrest Gump, puberty wet dreams or early middle age inability to come to terms with the Reaper. My theory – if I can avoid tottering through too much mirth – is they start knocking each other out because anything’s better than the hideous noises produced by other hipster mooseheads. They probably don’t like what they see in the mirror. If you have the misfortune to stand next to two of them in some bar and they start arguing the toss, do yourself a favour: Immediately crack their heads together, pour your drink over them while they’re on the floor, and then go and surrender yourself to the rozzers and plead justified self defence against bad taste and ignorance. That’s assuming some wannabe rock hack hasn’t in the meantime invented another bullshit item to go with “garage music,” “hip hop,” “indy,” “post structuralist” and all the other esoteric plebeian bollocks. My guess is nothing serious will come of it. If guilty, Gerrard will probably be let off with a light sentence. All he has to do is parrot the public relations hogwash all players are indoctrinated with from the age of sixteen, the kind of cliché-ridden script they intone in media interviews. This will possibly lead to removal of his ipod earphones for a couple of months, community wallpapering, and the reinsertion of his dummy. If he has any sense he’ll treat this as a chance to regain contact with reality instead of that eerie, wired-up klutzworld inside a microchip or the head of your average Premiership footballer. Gawd help us all when this lot finally get their collective finger on The Button. They’ll press it purely because they think it will play the latest track from Sid Snot and the Head Bangers. I mean, how else do you explain the Jolly Jack Tar who burst into tears when the Iranians confiscated his ipod during a territorial waters spat in the Gulf a few years ago?........You ask, “Spike Jones and his City Slickers, where are you when the world needs you?!” Then you remember Spike gave up taking the piss out of rock ‘n’ roll when he saw its performers were actually taking themselves seriously, that it was impossible to parody them. Football is almost at the same stage.

It was a short but interesting journey to Macclesfield. Almost all of the route took us through narrow twisting lanes and roads surrounded by the rural bucolia of farms, barns, nurseries, ersatz “Tudor” houses and country pubs with names like The Fox at Bay and The Boarhound. Some of it was really beautiful in the kind of tightly manicured and tidy way guaranteed to drive urban free thinkers and Socialist revolutionaries straight up the nearest tree. You imagine it to be a very structured society with little prospect or will to change. Funnily enough, we passed a grey electricity transformer on which someone had painted the phrase, “THE REVOLUTION WILL COME TO PASS.” It hadn’t been daubed in guilty haste, it had been carefully STENCILLED on. You thought, “Yeh, well, maybe,” while admiring a distant sight of Jodrell Bank radio telescope. Meanwhile, the weather was accommodating but still cold: Overhead, high, grey, opaque clouds ended off to our right, to the West, in a weather front as sharp as a knife, beyond which was clear blue sky trying to edge in from the Atlantic. Sadly, the blue sky stubbornly refused to move any further East.
The chosen pub was a five minutes walk to the ground. As you expected and hoped, it was small, very cosy and Mein Host Carl and his bar staff as warm and welcoming. Terry, later to insist on being called Tony for some strange reason (probably not unrelated to alcohol), shuttled everyone around like a mother hen, as he usually does. The Bus dispersed in conversational gangs behind tables, at the bar, and around the darts board and covered-over pool table. Then everyone opened coats, released layers of insulation, and got down to the pre-match ritual of arguing footy. There’s never much intellectual reason to it of course because nobody is ever persuaded to change their mind. But that isn’t the point – the real motivation is to loosen up and get into the chauvinist feel of things. Voices rise and fall in accordance with the beer levels and the rate at which someone takes the piss. Mogsy – a truly inspired shit stirrer – kicked it off by mentioning James McFadden. Before you could say, “Brett Angel,” the place went verbally Rorke’s Drift. The topic only petered out when Mark consulted the oracle on the internet to find out how many goals Mac has scored for Birmingham this season and how many are penalties. Unfortunately, the small, pale blue Delphic light he peered into told him he had to work his way through every Brum match. By the time he got oriented we had moved on to the date of the first derby, by which was meant Everton V the pinkies. Naturally, Mogsy said there must have been an Everton V Bootle match before that, and thus an earlier derby. You see, such times are like a Pandora’s Box. But you wouldn’t miss them for the world.

The scene was set for a traditional giant-killing act. If fortune went against you, one slip and you were out. The ground was in line with expectations, and quite full with 6,000. That is, very small, one open side and one open behind-the-goal as standing areas, and one side and one behind-the-goal as seated areas with low cantilevered roofs. The main stand was a tiny box-like structure – still the highest part of the stadium – on the standing side. To witness David slay Goliath two temporary TV camera gantries were attached to the cantilevered roofs. Evertonians were clustered tightly in the open end and along the side to their left. Small adverts for local firms were stuck on every available space. One large advert said, admirably, “Kids Under 12 Free All Season!” There were four slender floodlight pylons with eight lamps to each; on two of the pylons two lamps failed to work. The stadium is oriented south east to north west, so the sun set in the right hand corner opposite the Everton end. In the distance behind the other corner rose the beginnings of the beautiful Peak District and the Pennines. In the Macclesfield end, twenty or thirty of their rural fans sang with grim determination, “Macclesfield ‘Till I Die!” It would have been heartless for Evertonian reduced urban legions to respond, so they didn’t. As a result the crowd got raucous on only a few occasions. Most of the crowd noise in the Everton end came from gatherings of friends trying to keep themselves warm with banal chauvinism as the temperature plummeted with the sun. Insulated or not, gradually you lost feeling in the tip of your nose, then your ears, then your feet, then your knees. In short, it was fucking freezing and getting colder by the minute. When I bought a plastic cup of Bovril and an accompanying pie – asked for a steak pie the acne-ridden youngster said, “What type?” – they provided thermal protection lasting maybe sixty seconds. Gawd knows why we do this to ourselves.

Our team picked itself because we have nobody else except a few kids still in need of experience. Which, of course, they won’t get until they have some more games........So, as you were, minus Marouane Fellaini and still with Vic Anichebe and his sore back. Pre-match, we were told Louis Saha is out for another four weeks minimum. This means we have another month to hope we don’t get any more injuries. If we do, it effectively gooses what’s left of our season. However, it appears this adversity has bred a more determined team spirit. Being the FA Cup, this was about to be tested in the usual fashion.

As expected, Macclesfield went off at a gallop in the hope of an early unsettling goal. They could and should have had two in the first ten minutes. The first came after sixty seconds when their man had a clear chance from an angle right side of the penalty box and smashed it right-footed with tremendous force, only for it to just clear the bar and scatter the back row of seats like bowling pins. Had it been on target Tim wouldn’t have had a prayer. The second arrived on eight minutes when a cross from their right cleared our defence and left their incoming man with a free header which he should have buried easily from the left edge of the goal area. Instead, it too went over. Sighs of relief all round. We had survived the expected first wave of up-and-unders. Macclesfield weren’t cloggers but they weren’t exactly knocking it around with confidence either. Like all teams in a similar situation they knew they had to go at it while they still had the energy. The longer it went without a goal, the less likely they were to last the pace unscathed. And you have to hand it to them, they chased everything with the determination you expect in this sort of game. They only began to falter in the last third of the match. But their energy was sapped by relatively superior passing that had them chasing shadows, sometimes as though it was a training ground exercise. They tried to preserve energy by funnelling back into a thronged midfield and launching it from there. Still, it was edgy a lot of the time, even though Tim didn’t have much to do except for back-passes. While it was 0-0 everything could change if someone got one in a breakaway. Meantime, we created almost nothing despite superior possession. It was still very much in the balance.

As we came forward Macclesfield gave away a series of free kicks and corners without looking panicky or in too much trouble. Stern-faced, they defended everything. Mikky dropped a little deeper to have more control while spreading the ball wide to both wings, but we accomplished little through the middle due to the number of bodies in the way. Leon looked the most likely as he wriggled through tackles on a few occasions. Sadly, there was no final ball of any penetrating quality by anybody. Then just before half time Leon scored a terrific opportunist goal from right side edge of the penalty box. It fell just right for him and he half-volleyed it right-footed into the junction of bar and upright. I was in direct line with it and can tell you it looked in from the second he smashed it. Their ‘keeper had no chance though he made a brave effort.

The second half was more of the same: Mostly us, with an occasional burst from them. By mid half it even looked as though Tony Hibbert might get one as for some inexplicable reason they deserted their left side and left him to make a few promising runs into their penalty area. On the other flank Leighton Baines pressed them back too, though he faced better defensive work. Macclesfield made a commendable effort in the last five minutes but never really looked as though they were going to do anything. Up to that moment the only chance they had was another good one, dead centre of the D, which would have been driven home by a competent striker. But by then Macclesfield had lost any sharpness and the shot went straight at Tim. After that, the only exercise he got was a tremendous last-minute left-handed save low down when one of theirs found some room left of the penalty spot and got off a splendid shot which might have gone home on a better day. The rest of the time we passed it around and pressed in a sort of desultory fashion.

In the end it was a good win in difficult circumstances. Apart from the opening short spell we weren’t really tested, mainly because everybody stayed composed and disciplined. For all their enthusiasm, Macclesfield foundered, as you would expect and hope, on the rocks of superior ability and teamwork. There was no giant-killing in this match. But as usual, news filtered through of other Premiership clubs hitting rougher coral reefs and sinking with all hands. The sense of relief was obvious, along the lines of, “Thank Christ it wasn’t us this time.” We had avoided the dread first-time club record of third round exit three seasons in a row. It turned out we didn’t need Kryptonite, and Macclesfield were........well, Clark Kent after a work out. Phew.

*

What Do You Think The Score Will Be? e-mail info@bluekipper.com

* 3-1 to us. Gosling first goal. Timmy to get a brace, Peanuts to wear gloves. I wonder will ladbrokes give me odds on that? Mick Devereau. Isle Of Man

* 2-0 to Everton. Goals from Cahill and Arteta. Millie

* 1-0 to the Blues, Mikky's the Man to do the honours Mike Higgy

* The pitch at Moss Rose will inspected at 4pm on Friday, and Macclesfield are confident that the 3rd Round Cup tie will go ahead after hundreds of volunteers turned up to breath on the pitch, oh and cover it as well. Les Battersby aka Peter Walton will conduct the pitch inspection this tea time. Temperatures will be freezing again tonight, but the pitch is well tucked up.

So here we go again, its FA Cup Third Round weekend, as the Blues go in search of Wembley for the first time since 1995. Out of Europe and the League Cup, this gives the Blues the only chance of silverware this season, and by God are we due a run in it.

Defeats to Oldham, Chelski, Shrewsbury and Blackburn in recent years have given the Blues no cheer in the World most famous Cup competition, and in 2009 they face a tricky away trip to Second Division Macclesfield. Moyesy me thinks won't be tinkering with his team for two reasons. Reason One is that we have no squad to tinker with, and reason two is that its a Cup we are desperate to win, and I see the strongest line up possible for the Blues tomorrow. Ossie may be rested though after his knock against Chelski, and Big Vic may partner Tiny up front, but apart from that me thinks it will be business as usual for the Blues.

We face Macclesfield for the first time in our history, and they sit seventy two places below us. As we have found to our cost in the past though, that counts for nothing in the FA Cup. COYB.

Moyesy says: "The boys are playing really well at the minute and I’m pleased with how they are doing. Long may it continue and we are all looking forward to the game. We want to do well in the FA Cup. It’s been a long time since we had a run in it and hopefully this will be the year when we change that. The level of our performances have improved dramatically from what they were a couple of months ago when I wasn’t pleased with what I was seeing. We have had Macclesfield watched a number of times and we always do our homework,” said Moyes. We have prepared properly for this game but we prepared properly for the game at Shrewsbury. I don’t have many options, so I won’t be changing things." (02/01/09)

The Rat says: "The one thing you try and do is make it as uncomfortable as you can for the Premiership sides because they’re used to luxuries.They’ll be lucky to get the amount of players into the changing room, never mind the staff, the kit men, the doctors, surgeons, masseurs, fitness instructors. They’ll be lucky to get them all in. It was a great result for Shrewsbury at the time (beating Everton 2-1 in 2003). It was one that I thought we could win when I’d seen the team. I thought ‘we’ve got as good chance here’ - maybe the best chance that any side would have against an Everton side and the lads approached it really well. I was fortunate that the lads did really well and they got the result. We took our chances, a bit of quality in the side got us those chances I must admit. But afterwards you reflect on it and it's sort of ‘oh, what have we done?’ It was most probably one of my happiest days as a manager, and probably is my happiest day as a manager. Although I’d rather it had been against the reds than the Blues!" (02/01/09)

Sausage's XI To Start: Howard, Hibbert, Jagielka, Lescott, Baines, Neville, Arteta, Cahill, Fellaini, Pienaar, Anichebe

Everton from: Howard, Nash, Neville, Hibbert, Baines, Jagielka, Lescott, Osman, Arteta, Pienaar, van der Meyde, Cahill, Anichebe, Fellaini, Gosling, Jutkiewicz, Rodwell, Wallace, Kissock.

IF ANY EVERTON FAN WANTS TO WRITE A REPORT OF ANY OF THIS SEASON'S GAMES, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO DO SO. JUST E-MAIL IT TO info@bluekipper.com AND WE WILL PUT IT ON THE SITE.