Goodbye Howard Kendall - A very human champion

Howard Kendall will go down as one of the great managers of English football

It speaks volumes that characters like Santiago Bernabeu de Yeste, Johan Cruyff and Kenny Dalglish have a powerful hold over the respective imaginations of Real Madrid, Barcelona and Liverpool. Despite their supposedly alien provenance, they are on a plane of existence afforded to very few. Not only can they not be defined without their clubs, the clubs themselves are incomplete without these towering figures.

We lost another of those towering figures on 17^th October 2015.

Howard Kendall’s passing is responsible for the sombre mood around football at the moment. He was truly an incredible personality – dependable, successful and affectionate. A player and manager who, by rights, should be remembered as an emblematic symbol of the game but against whom questionable calls can also be brought.

Everton through and through

By the time he arrived on Merseyside in 1967, Everton already boasted the exquisite Colin Harvey and World Cup winner Alan Ball. The party was completed by Kendall - the final piece of the jigsaw.

The three quickly became the components of Everton’s greatest strength – their wonderful midfield. Nicknamed ‘The Holy Trinity’, the trio played in a manner consistent with their sobriquet. Full of style and steel, they were the masterminds behind Everton’s cerebral and attractive side of the late 1960s.

They got the big one as well – the league title in 1970 – but sadly, that’s where the bulldozer impersonation ended. With their young squad, Everton were expected to kick on and establish a new era of dominance.

Instead, they fell shockingly down the table.

Kendall was part of a formidable midfield during his playing days at Everton

To make matters worse, Liverpool were again in an ascendancy, winning trophy after trophy while Everton could only stand by and grind their teeth.

While a player-manager with the Toffees upon his return, Kendall formally called time on his playing career in 1981 but decided to stay on as manager.

Defining an era

Thus, the 1980s truly began on Merseyside – an era of great cultural revival in the port city, matched by Liverpool and Everton trading blows on the pitch as they battled for major honours.

Without him, it never would’ve been a contest. Of all the great team building exercises undertaken by anyone, Kendall’s has to rank somewhere near the top.

It genuinely was that good. And it happened when one of Everton’s finest ever players successfully rebuilt the side into the best since the one he had frisked around the pitch as a part of.

A warm up session in the 1984 League Cup final, then.

Everton took Liverpool all the way in two grim encounters, which the Toffees eventually lost. They, however, had every reason to feel aggrieved when Alan Hansen’s hand thwarted a goal-bound strike but nothing was given before Graeme Souness struck the killer blow in the replay at Maine Road three days later.

No matter. A couple of months later, the critical first trophy came. And it was Watford who were downed at Wembley – a 2-0 verdict in the 1984 FA Cup final.

The subsequent 1984-85 campaign remains one of the finest ever for an English club.

The impossible treble

It must have looked impossible at the beginning. But by spring 1985, Everton were gunning for a historic treble – the league, the FA Cup and the European Cup Winners’ Cup. Everton, ravaged by self-doubt and underachievement in years past, wouldn’t have thought it possible.

But Kendall almost pulled it off. Two famous games did it for them in the league – one, an excellent 1-2 win at White Hart Lane in April. The other, confirmation – 33 days later, a 2-0 win over Queen’s Park Rangers brought home the league championship after 15 long years.

Everton finished a full thirteen points clear of Liverpool in second.

Europe was even better. The second leg of the semi-final, a 3-1 gutting of Bayern Munich at Goodison Park, set up a final against Rapid Vienna. Featuring Michael Konsel, Hans Krankl and Zlatko Kranjcar, Rapid were expected to pose a stern challenge, but Everton reprised that 3-1 result to win their first European trophy in magnificent, historic fashion.

The greatest side to win nothing

Kendall picked up the Football Manager of the Year award in 1987 for helping Everton win the league

It seems so unbelievably strange, but oddly fitting, that Gary Lineker called the 1985-86 side the best he played in. But funnily, they won precisely zilch that season. In fact, they blew a possibly historic double.

Their implosion was catastrophically spectacular; watching that Everton side come together bit by bit over the years was edifying, but seeing them throw away their position atop the First Division was almost as physically and chemically electrifying. The emotions they produced were, of course, very different.

That was the dark side of Kendall’s coin of duality.

The sixpence took another frightening 180. Everton won the league again in 1987, this time by nine points, but Kendall was gone again, off to the wilds of the Basque Country for a crack at European football he knew the Heysel ban would not permit his beloved Everton.

That was the moment his career hit the brakes.

Never quite the same again

He did return to his ‘marriage’ by the winter of 1990. Everton were floundering before Kendall managed to save their season with a mid-table finish and a run to the Cup quarter finals. He quit once again in 1993, but he simply could not stay away for long.

Kendall returned to Everton for his third spell in 1997, but ended up quitting three weeks later

Kendall came back in 1997, with Everton in desperate trouble once again, unable to ignore the puppy dog eyes of his soul mate as they beseeched him for help.

Deep financial difficulty and Kendall’s battle with the demon drink, meant his biggest challenge with the Toffees, but goal difference eventually proved to be the paper thin membrane separating Everton from the drop that season.

He quit three weeks later.

Thus ended one of English football’s most enthralling unions. They say marriage takes away the excitement and the mystique of a relationship, but in Kendall’s case, it had only energised it.

A multi-dimensional legacy

What is Howard Kendall’s legacy? That is a question that has no direct answer.

His football achievements are, however, a good place to start. Howard Kendall’s collection of multiple trophies wasn’t simply accumulation of silverware – he also repaired Everton’s badly shattered self-confidence.

This great restoration brought the pride and swagger back to English football’s heartlands. Not only that, Liverpool were the convenient fall guys on both occasions, not so much beaten as pushed headfirst into a yawning chasm, their ‘great’ aura smashed to smithereens with Everton cackling gleefully on the sidelines.

It was partly due to the style of play. Had Everton sought to grind Europe and the league by playing percentages, it might have brought them success but nowhere near as much goodwill. Instead, Kendall built Everton in his own image, drawing on his memories of what had made them great in years past, to sculpt an intelligent passing side capable of competing with the best.

It was an assembly of poetry and romance so elegant, so baroque and so utterly convinced of its own magnificence that even the Liverpool fraternity were drawn to its magnetic pretentions and its irresistible personality. It forced them to stand up and applaud.

One of the great ‘what ifs’ of football is the possibility of Liverpool’s barnstorming vintage performance of 1987-88 upstaging Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan. It is certainly unfair to ignore the possibility of Howard Kendall’s Everton doing the same.

Unfair. Now there’s a word.

Ill judgement

Despite his success, Kendall seems to occupy a strange plane in the public football consciousness – certainly respected and admired in his own parish, but floating somewhere behind the established favourites in English football’s pecking order of greatness.

Is that unfair? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It is at least debatable that Howard Kendall’s perception as somewhat of a flawed genius is well founded.

Is it just an ill conspiracy of circumstances, then? Or is there a firm suggestion of self-infliction?

Was he too clouded by emotion to ignore the old adage of ‘never go back’, which led to a slight tarnish of his legacy courtesy two less successful spells at Everton?

Should he not have made the double of 1986 safe long before Kenny Dalglish the player rolled back the years to snatch it away right at the very end? Was the 1985 FA Cup not disappointingly lost by allowing a 10-man Manchester United to claim a 1-0 win?

The people’s man at the people’s club

A minute’s silence was offered during the Premier league match between Everton and Manchester United

If anything, it contributes to his mystique. Howard Kendall was a gentleman and an affable character, a chap given to his vice (as geniuses often are) but one who made magical things happen and created priceless memories.

Somehow, the fallible view of Mr. Kendall convinced fans his tremendous appeal lay in the fact that he was human – as human as any of them. His passing reminds us this man was one of us and is similarly mortal.

Kevin Keegan told a beautiful story in his autobiography from the time Bill Shankly passed away in 1981. It was of the Everton players halting training mid-way, muddy kit and all, to line up in a single file with their heads bowed in silent respect as Shankly’s coffin was being carried past the Bellfield training ground.

One would expect Kendall to be honoured with a comparable sentiment.