Same Old Story

Seventy-nine days. That's how long we had. Seventy-nine days and, according to Angus Kinnear, a plan and proper budget rather than us rummaging down the back of Kenwright's old sofa for loose change. And we still ended deadline day with one senior striker, one senior left-back, one senior right-back and a fanbase online at midnight thinking that Paddy Power will be planning their next Everton advert in the morning.

Only Everton could turn a window with a supposed plan into a fresh installment of the same old farce of kicking the can down the road to the next window – where the same shitty excuses will get trolled out. The last time we signed a decent left-back was 8 years ago. The last time we signed a decent striker was 13 years ago and the last time Everton signed a decent right-back was 17 years ago – but even he wasn't ready for the Premier League for at least another year. This is while we watch Brentford, Brighton and Bournemouth with an endless supply of new recruits scrapping to get in the team, to get their big move to Chelsea or City.

Let's be fair, though, there were genuinely good bits in this transfer window. I'm not going to pretend otherwise just to keep the outrage going. Hayden Hackney looks a proper piece of business, Championship Player of the Season plucked from Middlesbrough at 24 with his best years still ahead of him for £16million, relative peanuts in today's money. Christian Nørgaard arriving from Arsenal for around £7million gives us the sort of experienced legs in midfield that Idrissa Gueye used to provide before his contract quietly ran out and nobody seemed to have a plan for what came next.

Tyrique George's loan being made permanent means we finally stop renting a player we should've just bought outright a year ago, and Röhl staying on the same basis ties up one more loose end from last season. Swapping Brennan Johnson for Dwight McNeil makes me think that the Crystal Palace recruitment team were all stoned for a whole week, and are now running around panicking with the munchies trying to hide their mess. Even a blindfolded Ainsley Maitland-Niles must be better than Patterson, even if the general consensus amongst Lyon fans is that he was wearing a blindfold for most of last season.

Jack Grealish coming back on loan is the one that will actually get Goodison — sorry, Hill Dickinson — buzzing again, because, whatever else you say about the summer, the man clearly loves being at Everton, and that counts for something.

But here's the thing about a transfer window: you don't get judged on your best five minutes, you get judged on the squad at eleven o'clock on deadline night, and ours has three gaping holes that my dog would've spotted while chasing a squirrel. We let Beto go to Fiorentina fully expecting Folarin Balogun to walk through the door as his replacement. £40million, medical booked, deal sheet in, and then it all fell apart in the small hours because of some issue on the medical that nobody at Finch Farm could foresee, then Balogun himself decided he fancied a change of heart rather than a change of league. Fine, transfers collapse, mediocre agents oversell mediocre knees, that happens to every club eventually. What doesn't happen to every club is having no plan B, no emergency loan lined up, nothing.

Joshua Zirkzee got a call. Tammy Abraham got a call. Neither of them fancied it, and why would they, watching Everton flap about at five to midnight like a student finishing their dissertation at 8am after 8 cans of Red Bull. We went into deadline day with Beto already gone and came out of it with Thierno Barry as our only recognised senior centre-forward. One dodgy tackle in the derby, one two-match ban for waving in the wrong direction, one dodgy hamstring in November and we are up shit creek.

And it's not even the only hole. While everyone was doom-scrolling about the striker situation, somebody might have wanted to mention that Vitalii Mykolenko is now our only specialist left-back after Adam Aznou was shipped out to Malaga on loan. So we've built a squad that's one injury away from a crisis in three different positions, at a club that has just moved into one of the best stadiums in the country and finally should have the cash to avoid exactly this kind of amateur hour. It's the football equivalent of fitting a new kitchen after forgetting to first fix the plumbing and electrics.

The maths doesn't help the mood either. We took a paltry £65million for Iliman Ndiaye, one of the better attacking players we've had in years, sold off to Manchester City on the same deadline day we were meant to be signing his replacement up front. Add in the £15 million for Beto and you're looking at a genuinely decent chunk of incoming cash, and somehow, despite that, despite the Hackney deal and the Nørgaard deal and the Johnson swap and everything else, we've ended the window looking thinner up front than we did at the start of it. That's not misfortune. Misfortune is one deal falling through. This is what happens when your last-minute recruitment plan for a £40 million centre-forward has no fallback beyond hoping a Manchester United reject or an Aston Villa squad player fancies a late change of scenery.

And just to top off the chaos, we somehow also had Harrison Armstrong halfway out the door before the fans, and if rumours are true David Moyes, both revolted. One of our own academy graduates, someone half the fanbase had marked down as a genuine first-team prospect, apparently good enough to sell but then, at the last minute, not sold after all. It was a massive about turn from whoever was trying to sell him, nobody at the club seems keen to clarify, which tells you everything about how this window was actually run. They can't even manage to be consistent about who we're trying to get rid of. It looked like the fire sales of old when Kenwright flogged anything that wasn't needed for a weekend game.

This time it actually stings. We've heard the excuses about squad depth and late business collapsing before, back in the days when NTL promised to clear the overdraft and everyone understood, sort of, why deadline day always ended in farce. We might look back at Ringmaster Moshiri and his team of calamitous clowns, but even they were able to get players to turn up on time at the right place and sign on the dotted line. Those old excuses should be history now. The stadium's built, we're paying £6.50 for a donut, £14 for the wrong burger and £100 for a replica top, but we are not seeing this money being spent on the team. The infrastructure everyone said we needed before we could compete properly is finally, actually here. And we still somehow contrived to leave ourselves exposed in exactly the way that Ipswich, Hull and Coventry didn't – they all outspent Everton without having a shiny new money making stadium and billionaire Texan owners.

Because when it mattered, in those last few hours, there was no urgency, no alternative lined up, no sense that anyone at the club had considered what happens if the big one falls through. It fell through. Of course it fell through. Because this is Everton.

We were supposed to be past this but it is the same old story.