Anfield has become a place of foreboding for Evertonians irrespective of their team’s startling decline this season and Liverpool’s prolific form. But not for Wayne Rooney. This is the game the former England captain has been waiting for since rejoining his boyhood club in July and he is the reason Sam Allardyce believes Everton should not enter the 229th Merseyside derby with fear.
“Liverpool,” said Rooney, without hesitation or mention of Manchester United, when asked in the summer what fixture he was most looking forward to back in royal blue. Rooney has never scored in a Merseyside derby. Hitting Chris Kirkland’s crossbar and not the back of the net in a goalless draw in December 2002 was as close as he came before leaving for Old Trafford and remains one of his biggest regrets. It is his mentality and intelligence on the ball, however, not his continued eye for goal, that Rooney’s new manager is relying on for Sunday’s trip across Stanley Park.
Everton have not won at Anfield since 1999 and their repeated failure to perform in the fixture, even when supposedly the form team, gives credence to Jamie Carragher’s claim that he could sense fear in his local rivals as soon as they met in the tunnel. That theory was put to Allardyce on Friday. “We’ve got Wayne Rooney haven’t we?” he shot back.
“I would think that he’d be able to handle that. I know he’s back at Everton, and it’s Everton v Liverpool, but there have been lots of games called Manchester United v Liverpool that he’s been involved in and he has to use that. It’s very similar.
“As an Evertonian he is desperate to do well, as he was when he was at Manchester United and was desperate to beat them then. They have a rivalry and while he was there Manchester United were better than Liverpool for the vast majority of the time.
“Wayne has seen and done it all before so he’s got a big part to play in that. Mentality is everything to start with. If you show any fear then Liverpool generally take advantage of that but if you show a good positive attitude of what you intend to do and how you intend to do it, they then know they are in for a difficult game.”
Allardyce was in the directors’ box at Goodison Park against West Ham United when Rooney lifted the tension with the first hat-trick of his Everton career. Dropping into a deeper role has suited the 32-year-old, who has delivered more than most of the club’s summer outfield signings, and he will be key to the manager’s containment gameplan at Anfield.
“Everton is his club and he can use all that experience to deliver the kind of performance he gave against West Ham and that would please me an awful lot,” Allardyce said. “It would mean it would give us a chance to create and score a goal with that type of performance.
“We have to do it as a team but we want him to play a big part in that team performance because he has the ability to create problems. So we have to feed him enough ball if we possibly can, we have to make the right runs off him, and we have to make the right passes that might get through the Liverpool defence.
“He was the stand-out player against West Ham not just because of the hat-trick but because of how much he created for us. I hope we are not putting too much pressure on him.”
The pressure is more likely to come from Liverpool’s formidable forward line. Allardyce was the last visiting manager to win at Anfield, when he oversaw Crystal Palace’s 2-1 victory in April and then eulogised about the gameplan that exposed the limitations in Jürgen Klopp’s team. He was more restrained in his Everton tracksuit on Friday. “We won last year with Palace and that was after going 1-0 down with a team that was threatened with relegation,” he said. “Not many teams do that at Anfield and I can look at what we did then but Liverpool are playing much better today than they were when I was at Palace.
“Their natural talent and their flair is a concern to us, which we have to try to stop. You can’t say: ‘If we block off these two players then we will stop Liverpool.’ The way they are playing at the moment it’s four or five players for me.
“That is the hard bit for us, that interchange of movement, the runs that they make, the skill they have on the ball. And their finishing has increased. They don’t have to rely on one or two people to score goals, they have goals all around the front line now. But it can be done. It depends how we individually and collectively play as a team.”
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