The knees are slightly bent, the lofted arms waving just a touch as if controlled by a stiff breeze; they let slip the reverence that is shaking through his body. And then David Moyes begins to dance, as if the father of the bride has just escaped a slightly dull chat with Aunty Sheila and intends to make up for the lost minutes. Your daughter only gets married for the first time once, after all, and who knows when West Ham might be here again.
Moyes is not a man who exists to revel in the big occasions. Kings and courtiers and glitzy showpiece finals are not his natural home. He is a man of Glasgow, of Bearsden on the north edge of the city where he watched his father coach junior teams at Drumchapel Amateurs and allowed “proper” football to seep in via osmosis and never wished to let it escape.
When Moyes was presented with three suit options for Prague, he firmly and politely declined. If he and his team were going to do this, they would do it the same way they got here. A new set of Umbro tracksuits were quickly ordered.
It may sound a little like damnation with faint praise to call this Moyes’s great culmination, a 25-year coaching career that peaks in the third-ranking Uefa competition. What about the progress and stability at Everton, the appointment to replace Sir Alex Ferguson, the courage to move abroad and fail there without it killing his buzz for this life? Stuff them; stuff all of them. None of them comes close to this.
To consider anything else is to spectacularly miss the point of this silly sport. We too easily forget that trophies matter most. There is time for long-termism, for building for the future and for concentrating on the league; these are not mutually exclusive aims and the best-run clubs do both.
But what is all of that forethought even for, if not the heady minutes that you desperately try to extend into days and wish you could bottle up and sell to every coach who possesses nothing but a dream and a work ethic.
When you look back in months, years and decades, as an ageing mind blurs the vividity of the continuous present into blurred half-thoughts of the past that become so distant they might as well have been someone else’s experience, it is the moments that persevere like night-time beacons on the top of a hill.
They exist as flashbulb memories, less about the details and all about the experience – “Where was I when…?”. That is Moyes’ great achievement here: not the Uefa Conference League trophy or Europa League qualification, but the mentions of that night in Prague 20 years from now in Dagenham and Leyton and East Ham.
It is fitting that this came at the end of a long difficult season pockmarked by the wounds of slings and arrows; Moyes knows that outrageous fortune more than most. They, including those who danced and sang long into the Prague night, wanted him gone. He saw their point: the desperate away form, the attacking lethargy, the new signings who just didn’t fit. But that only makes the end more sweet.
Our gaffer as you've never seen him before!
— West Ham United (@WestHam) June 8, 2023pic.twitter.com/e1JzNuioA4
The song choice? Perfect, even if a little saccharine. Moyes has walked a thousand miles and more and he’s gonna be the man who’s working hard for you.
He cannot know what happens next. He will not look back fondly on all that brought him here. So instead he will choose to exist in that glorious moment when jubilation and vindication and exaltation blended into one.
Dance like nobody’s watching? Pah. Moyes wants the world to see this boogie and to tell them how it feels.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/yPi1JXR
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