One year of TFG life

..WITH THE INSIDE TRACK FROM GOODISON

- Joe Thomas

STILL remember the day it all fell apart.

For the first summer in a few, there was genuine positivity growing around Everton. I had spent a week around the first team camp in Ireland, formally interviewing the likes of Tim Iroegbunam, Beto and Seamus Coleman but also bumping into them, and others, around the Carton House hotel complex that formed their HQ for a preseason spent just outside Dublin.

From the sleepy base of Maynooth to the bustling streets of the Irish capital, where Everton’s new home kit took centre stage in the Castore high street outlet, there was a feelgood factor that had been missing through years of tumult - of relegation battles, boardroom crises and takeover sagas. The Friedkin Group were in talks to end the last of those fights and hope was creeping in that stability could return to a club.

And then it imploded, as it so often did at Everton in the final years of the reign of Farhad Moshiri.

I had boarded a train from Dublin just after 9am, one that would take me the width of the country to Sligo, where Everton would kickoff their preseason schedule with what was essentially a tribute to Coleman.

Somewhere in the rolling green hills I received the news TFG had withdrawn from talks. I remember the gasps after sharing news on social media and then watching and listening as Blues in the carriages caught on. One supporter simply looked at me from about four tables down and mouthed: “Is it true?”

The mood shift was clear at Sligo Rovers’ Showgrounds stadium. As the only dedicated Everton reporter there, often the case when the ECHO follow preseason games abroad, I had to sit among the club’s media team. They, like staff back in Liverpool, were stunned.