Everton hope history repeats itself after Scotland training camp inspired season of big improvement

Everton assistant manager Alan Irvine recalled how a trip to a Scottish training camp in 2002 helped revive the Blues’ fortunes

Everton will be hoping to roll back the years under David Moyes after they jetted off to their Scottish training camp on Monday.

Following their 3-0 victory over Chelsea on March 21, the Blues were three points off a Champions League qualification spot but after failing to win any of their last seven matches, they slumped to 13th in the table.

Back in 2002, ahead of Moyes’ first full season in charge at Goodison Park, he took his team on a similar trip and it proved to be the springboard to securing seventh spot the following May after just one top-half finish for the club in the first decade of the Premier League.

Everton would subsequently record nine top-eight finishes under the Glaswegian during his first spell in charge, including fourth in 2004/05, their highest-ever position in the Premier League.

Speaking to this correspondent on his episode of Goodison Park: My Home in August 2024, five months before he returned to the Blues as Moyes’ assistant manager, Alan Irvine was asked what the secret to the success was.

He told the ECHO: “We had a really good meeting up in St Andrews with the players. We kind of had the players in three different groups: goalkeeper and defenders; midfielder players and forwards.

“Let’s says it’s the defenders and the goalkeeper. We started it off with: ‘Right, what do you need the players in front of you to do to help you to do your job?’

“We then said: ‘What can you do to help them to do their job?’ We had the same questions with the midfield players and with the forward players.

“What we got out of that was: ‘This is what we’re agreeing on to try and move forward. This is what you’re all saying, you’re all accepting that you have to help each other as the different units’.

“We told them: ‘This is how we are now going to prepare our training and how we will prepare for matches, based on these principles’. Nowadays everyone calls it a philosophy, but it was: ‘Come on lads’, with the emphasis on them being asked the right questions in order to get the answers themselves.

“Straightaway, we had this real good direction that we were going to try and go in. We had a really good pre-season, the St Andrews trip was part of that, we came back in really good nick and we got off to a good start.

“As we see almost every year in the Premier League, the teams that come flying out of the traps, they can sustain it. It can carry them all the way, you’re in that situation where the momentum just carries you along.”