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Before the Whistle · 11 October 2026

Hull City (a)

Two days after the owners put Everton up for sale, Moyes takes a squad he calls short to a side unbeaten at home.

Unashamedly written by a machine · The suffering is real

Second edition, 13:07 · Mykolenko is not in the squad, so Michael Keane comes in and Branthwaite goes to left-back, with Johnson keeping the right and Dibling on the bench again; Hull leave Belloumi and Iroegbunam on theirs, so the duel on the left that the afternoon was meant to turn on is off until the hour. Prediction: Hull 1–2 Everton, Tarkowski from a Grealish free kick and Barry after the hour.

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Everton go to Hull this afternoon unbeaten, without a league win away from home since February, and two days after their owners said they would like to sell the club. David Moyes heard about the sale on Friday morning like everybody else. He takes eighteen outfield players to a ground where Hull have not conceded at home this season, and Vitalii Mykolenko, his only left-back, had "got a chance" of being one of them and is not. Tim Iroegbunam, sold to Hull by Everton on deadline day, was ruled out by the local paper on Friday morning and was back in training by the afternoon.

Where We Left It

With a win, a complaint and three weeks to think about both. Everton beat Ipswich Town 1–0 on 19 September through an eleventh-minute James Tarkowski volley that struck Thierno Barry on the chest and went in. Barry headed a second from a corner before the hour and Stuart Attwell took it away at the monitor, because Brennan Johnson was standing offside in front of the goalkeeper. Ipswich had Abdul Fatawu sent off for a dive, and against ten men Everton produced twenty-one shots with two on target. Moyes called that "not any good" and went into the break with Barry on five goals, a side unbeaten in seven and a squad he has described since, to anyone who asked, as short.

The table moved while nobody was playing. Fifth on that Saturday evening, Everton had been passed by Leeds and Liverpool before the weekend was out, and they are eighth this morning on the BBC's table and on Wikipedia's: five played, two won, three drawn, six scored, three conceded, nine points. Leeds and Liverpool have nine as well, with more goals; Brentford and Chelsea have ten, Brighton thirteen, Arsenal and Manchester City fifteen. Ipswich, beaten at Hill Dickinson, are ninth on nine, and Hull are tenth on eight. The Echo prefers seventh for Everton and Hull Live eighth for Hull, which is the kind of dispute an international break produces. It changes nothing about the afternoon. Everton have not won away in the league since a 3–2 at Newcastle on 28 February, seven games ago, and are the favourites by the reckoning of both sets of supporters.

The Week in Brief

It was three weeks and the news came in the last two days. On Friday morning The Friedkin Group, who completed their purchase of Everton in December 2024, announced that they were "exploring new investment options for Everton Football Club, including the potential sale of a controlling interest". The statement said the club had faced "significant financial uncertainty" when they arrived, that the first priority had been stability and the stadium, and that "with that foundation now safely in place, the time is right to consider the next chapter for Everton". They would "only entertain interest from parties who we strongly believe will be the right stewards to take the club forward", and they would "not be commenting further while this work is underway". That last undertaking was the easy one, since it was the first thing they had said in public for six weeks. The Guardian reported that Moelis & Company, an investment bank, will handle any sale, that TFG hope to conclude a deal this season, and that an asking price of about £800m, including some £380m of debt, is understood; the Echo carried the same figures as what "is believed". None of it is yet on the record from the sellers.

Moyes heard when everyone else did. "I've only found out this morning like everybody else and I'm a little bit surprised, but maybe I shouldn't be that surprised," he said at Friday's press conference, which he took himself. "I think most of us expected them to be here for the next 20-30 years. But maybe after the way things worked out in the transfer window, I think we'd seen through that." He was "more disappointed for Evertonians who have to go through another period of: 'who's going to be the new owner?'" Later he said it more plainly: "I would have hoped that they thought they could have broken the glass ceiling here at Everton." On his own position, in the last year of his contract, he had "not really thought about it yet from that point of view". On January, the question under all of this, he wanted to be able to tell supporters what might be spent, and could not: "I need to be really careful because we've got some difficult games; first we're away at Hull and then we've got Chelsea and Arsenal so things can change quickly." And one line that will be read back to him whichever way the season goes: "I'm too old to be hanging around just outside relegations battles and stuff like that."

The football news got lost in the flurry, as the Echo's Paul Wheelock put it, and it was better than feared. Vitalii Mykolenko, who has played every minute of Everton's league season at left-back, played the whole of Ukraine's win in Hungary on 25 September and then none of their next three games. Ukraine's coach, Andrea Maldera, was reported by the agency UNN as saying "Unfortunately, we cannot count on Mykolenko, he is not feeling very well. We do not want him to suffer an even more serious injury." Nobody has said what the injury is. Moyes on Friday: "[Mykolenko] has got a chance for Sunday, the extra day might help. We'll see. We've just got the England players back today for the first time, so hopefully they'll all be fit and ready to go." Since Adam Aznou went to Málaga on loan on deadline day there is no other left-back at the club, which is why one player's minor injury has been the whole of the team news for a fortnight. Christian Nørgaard, who signed from Arsenal on 5 August and has yet to play a competitive minute, got forty-five against Blackburn behind closed doors on 2 October and is in full training. Moyes would rather wait: "He's making progress. I don't know if he's quite ready yet to be involved, but with our numbers being so short, it might be something I have to look at. If I had my way, I would certainly give him a good bit more time, if I could." Merlin Röhl was absent from the club's training pictures and was not mentioned on Friday. He told the German magazine Kicker this week that he is "completely past worrying about which position I play now", which is the right frame of mind for a man who does not currently have one.

The rest of the break was mostly good. Tyler Dibling, left out against Ipswich and the best player on the pitch for the twenty-five minutes he got, scored after seven minutes for England's under-21s in Cork, and Tyrique George and Harrison Armstrong came on for the last half-hour of the same defeat. Jordan Pickford started England's 3–0 win over Czechia at Wembley on Tuesday and James Garner and Jarrad Branthwaite came off the bench, which is as gentle an England week as a club five days from a Sunday kick-off can hope for. Peter Reid told the Echo of Armstrong that he "thought it was a strange decision to think about letting him go", and of Dibling: "I loved the pass that he did against Wolves but also the fact that he chased back and won the ball, and I thought 'wow'." Sam Allardyce, who sat with Moyes at a dinner on Monday, passed on the manager's view of his squad in six words: "He would like some more players." The Echo's count is eighteen outfield players, among them one striker, one left-back and one right-back, in a side that has not lost.

And the calendar did what the calendar does. This game was listed for three o'clock on Saturday 10 October and moved, by an announcement the clubs made on 17 August, to two o'clock on the Sunday and onto Sky. The reason given in Hull's season record is Hull Fair, which sets up on Walton Street beside the ground and opened on Friday at four. The city council's opening times for the week read, in full, "Sunday 11 October - Closed". So the match was moved off the Saturday because the fair would be open, onto the one day of its run when it is shut, and then put on television, which is about the order in which the people who go are considered. The trains are a better story. The RMT had called TransPennine Express conductors out on every Sunday in October; the operator's page now says "RMT strike action planned for Sundays 11, 18 and 25 October has been suspended" and trains are expected to run as normal. As normal this weekend means the Liverpool to Hull service is "diverted between Manchester Victoria and Dewsbury, calling additionally at Newton-le-Willows and Brighouse" for engineering work, so the away end gets Brighouse, which it had not asked for. The last train home and the price of an away ticket were not on any page this piece could read. The ground sold out by the end of September, by Hull Live's account and their supporters'.

The Hosts

Hull City came up through the play-offs in May, when Oli McBurnie scored a stoppage-time winner against Middlesbrough in the Championship play-off final, and are in the top division for the first time since 2016–17. The head coach is Sergej Jakirović, appointed in June 2025, who beat Manchester United 2–0 on the opening day and so became the first Bosnian to manage and win a Premier League match. He was the league's manager of the month for August and signed a two-year extension on 4 September, and nobody has yet found a reason to write a "pressure" piece about him. The money went where promoted money goes: Konstantinos Tzolakis in goal from Olympiacos for £20m, Nobel Mendy from Rayo Vallecano for £22m, Lucas Herrington from Colorado for £17m, Mohamed-Ali Cho from Nice for £13m, Brooke Norton-Cuffy from Genoa for £12m, and on 1 September Iroegbunam from Everton, for £13m with £9m more in add-ons by Hull's record and £22m by Everton's, the same deal told from each end of the M62.

Two Hulls appear in that table. At home they have beaten Manchester United, whom Everton could only draw with, held Aston Villa and not conceded. Away they start slowly and then come: behind after seven minutes at Stamford Bridge and in front by the thirty-fourth, two down inside seven at St James' Park and back to one on sixty-seven. Six league goals have come from five scorers, and only Mohamed Belloumi, with both at Chelsea, has more than one. McBurnie, whose goals put them here, has none in the top flight: Hull Live has him failing to score in each of his five Premier League appearances so far this season from ten shots, and Craig Fagan, who went up with Hull in 2008, spent the week in the paper backing him to find his confidence. The rest of the method is in the disciplinary table. Hull have eighteen yellow cards in five league games, more than any side in the division by a distance, from an average of ten fouls a match, a ratio to be admired or deplored depending on which end of the ground you are in. Jakirović regards it as the job being done. "In my opinion, defence wins titles and of course, our title is to stay in the league," he said last month.

The shape has been a back three, with Mendy, Semi Ajayi and John Egan the names Hull Live expects in it, Mendy back from the concussion that kept him out at Newcastle, and Lewie Coyle, the captain, and Ryan Giles outside them. McBurnie is alone up front, Belloumi on the right. The midfield is where Hull's paper thinks the game lives: "The key battle against David Moyes' side will surely come in midfield," with Armstrong, Garner and Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall the test, and its own reading of the numbers is that no player in the division has covered more ground than Armstrong. Jakirović wants a quicker start than his side managed at Chelsea or on Tyneside, and he has had a fortnight to work on one. His Friday press conference was given mostly to Everton, and he was generous about them in the way of a man with a plan. "It's very difficult to stay unbeaten, and I think they are very pragmatic. They have a very high tactical discipline, good players, three international players from England, and also Jack Grealish is there, he can make the difference anytime." On Moyes, whom he will meet for the first time, he was lighter. "I call this type of coaches, 'Old Folks'," he said, meaning it kindly: they know everything about football, and he could learn from them, "but also it's good for me that I can compete with him, and maybe I can beat him." On his own side's start: "We felt this against Newcastle, two mistakes, two goals, but we didn't surrender."

Then there is Iroegbunam, whose name this fixture has carried since 1 September. On Friday morning Hull Live had him missing the game with a knee that had looked for a while like something serious. By Friday afternoon his coach had him on the training pitch. "He will be available, but he did his first training session with the group (on Friday)," Jakirović said. "He jumped and damaged it, but thank God it's not ACL, it's MCL, so he got lucky in that moment." Hull's paper now expects him to start, if he came through Saturday's session. Matt Targett twisted an ankle in training and is out; Norton-Cuffy and Hidemasa Morita are back; Charlie Hughes and Darko Gyabi are not, and Jack Butland and Elliot Matazo are longer-term. Belloumi, McBurnie and Sorba Thomas all played a lot of football for their countries in the break and are, in Hull Live's word, to be assessed. Joe Gelhardt, born on Merseyside and a Liverpool supporter as a boy, told the paper he was on trial at Everton at nine or ten and has a friend in the away end this afternoon: "My mate's going to the game in the away end with the Everton fans." He hopes to beat them in front of him. Everyone who has ever had a mate in the other end will understand both halves of that.

The Particulars

The Questions the Team Sheet Will Answer

No eleven was guessed here. The real ones arrived at a quarter to one and are below. What could be said beforehand is what the sheet would settle.

Is Mykolenko on it? Everything else follows from this. If he starts, the back four picks itself, Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Tarkowski, Branthwaite and Mykolenko in front of Pickford, with Garner and Armstrong in midfield and the argument confined to the wings. If he does not, Moyes must choose between things he dislikes. The Echo's three writers, asked to pick a side on Sunday morning, split three ways on the contingency: Chris Beesley would move Garner to left-back rather than test Branthwaite's hamstrings on the wing; Connor O'Neill would do the same and bring Hayden Hackney into the middle; Paul Wheelock would drop Garner to right-back, shift Maitland-Niles across and start Nørgaard, and concedes "that feels like too much tinkering to a team that are unbeaten in their first seven matches". Any of those puts Nørgaard, who has one closed-doors half behind him, nearer a Premier League debut than his manager wants, and all of them exist because the club lent out Aznou, its second left-back, on the last day of August. The sheet will say which one Moyes chose, or whether the extra day did help.

Who plays on the right? Johnson has had the right side in the league and the Echo's marks for his last two league starts were fives. Dibling was benched against Ipswich, came on for twenty-five minutes, was the best player on the pitch and has since scored for England's under-21s. George scored the goal against Manchester United from that side. Beesley picks George; O'Neill and Wheelock keep Johnson and call it harsh on the other two, which is what the manager will probably do too. The lesson of the Ipswich week, when Moyes praised Dibling on the Friday and left him out on the Saturday, is that this manager's warmth is not a selection. Dibling's name on the sheet would mean craft against a back three that sits and waits; Johnson's would mean pace behind wing-backs who push on, and Newcastle scored twice inside seven minutes doing exactly that to Hull.

Grealish or George on the left? Grealish started the last league game, made more than anyone on the pitch and left to an ovation on seventy-nine minutes. He stayed at Finch Farm through the break. George went to Cork. Three weeks' rest favours the man who used it for training, which is Grealish, and Hull's coach has already named him as the one who "can make the difference anytime". Charly Alcaraz, who scored against Blackburn, is the name behind both of them and the one the Echo's readers keep writing in. If Alcaraz starts, the shape has changed. Dewsbury-Hall has started every game this season, made the chances against Ipswich and was the forum's villain for the same afternoon; Moyes, who was "ratting" his players for their finishing three weeks ago, has one fewer reason to leave out the man who makes them.

And for Hull. Does Iroegbunam start against the club that sold him, on one training session, or wait on the bench? Is the back three the one that has not conceded at home, with Mendy restored, or the one that let in two inside seven minutes at Newcastle? Is Norton-Cuffy, the £12m right-back, fit enough to begin after his hamstring? The one line to read first on Hull's sheet is the left wing-back, because that is who Johnson or Dibling will be running at, and the second is the number ten, because that is who Belloumi will be looking for.

The Team Sheet

Everton's substitutes: Travers, O'Brien, Nørgaard, Hackney, Röhl, Alcaraz, Dibling, George, Graham.

Hull's substitutes: Stroud, Norton-Cuffy, McNair, Herrington, Morita, Iroegbunam, Phillips, Belloumi, Vaz.

Mykolenko is not on it. He is not on the bench either, so the extra day did not help, and Moyes chose none of the three contingencies the Echo's writers offered him at breakfast. He has done the thing Beesley would not: Michael Keane comes in at centre-half, Branthwaite, hamstrings and all, goes to left-back, and Garner stays where he is, beside Armstrong, rather than being moved to either flank. Nørgaard and Hackney are on the bench, where the manager wanted them, and Maitland-Niles keeps the right. It is the least tinkering available to a man with no left-back, which is to say it is the Moyes answer, and it leaves Everton with three centre-halves across a back four and the ball-carrying left-back of the first five games replaced by a man whose game is heading things away.

The right is Johnson's, as O'Neill and Wheelock thought and Beesley did not, and Dibling is on the bench for the second league game running, with his goal in Cork to keep him company. George is beside him, so the left is Grealish's, Dewsbury-Hall starts again behind Barry, and Alcaraz, the forum's write-in candidate, waits again. Tarkowski has the armband. The manager who called his squad short has, in the end, had to use it.

Hull's answers are the more surprising. Belloumi, who played three games for Algeria in the break and scored in two of them, is on the bench, which Hull Live's "to be assessed" turns out to have meant; Iroegbunam, on one training session, is there beside him, and so is Norton-Cuffy. Jakirović has picked the back three that has not conceded at home, Mendy restored between Ajayi and Egan, with Coyle and Giles outside them, and in front of it a midfield of Crooks and Slater with Sorba Thomas wide right, where Belloumi would have been, and Gelhardt, the Merseysider with a mate in the away end, on the left. McBurnie is alone up front with no goals in five. So the left wing-back Johnson will be running at is Giles, and the man looking for a number ten is Gelhardt, who is one. Hull without Belloumi are a side built to keep the ball out and not much else, which on their home record so far has been enough.

Two to Watch

Everton: Jack Grealish

The man who plays the way a Blue takes to first, and the one Hull's coach picked out unprompted. He is in his second loan season from Manchester City, has started one of Everton's four league games this season, the win over Ipswich, and came on in the other three, and his cup start against Wolves ended with him tripped in the box and no penalty. The ovation at Hill Dickinson on 19 September was for seventy-nine minutes of a different kind of football: the ball held, the foul drawn, the pass delayed until the full-back has committed. The Echo's Beesley writes that his "second coming ensures that he's now the main man on the left flank again". TPF, which splits on him every week, is this week united in anticipation of the first free kick he wins by falling over, which it intends to enjoy.

The Guardian's preview of the weekend says why this afternoon could be his: it calls Jakirović and Moyes two of the division's "pragmatic" managers and expects "a game featuring two defences that pride themselves on their obduracy" to be settled by "a well-delivered dead ball into a packed penalty area". A side that commits ten fouls a game gives away ten free kicks a game, and Grealish is the player most likely to be on the floor when one of them is given. Hull's wide men defend, Belloumi above all, and a team in a mid-block waits for a winger to try something; Grealish's game is not to try something but to make the other side do so first. The record has its own joke to add: both of his Everton goals last season, against Crystal Palace in October and at Bournemouth in December, came in games Salisbury refereed. He has not scored this season. The dead ball into the packed box is where this game will be decided, by most accounts, and he is the one most likely to have won it.

Hull City: Mohamed Belloumi

The expensive names are Tzolakis and Mendy and the Everton name is Iroegbunam, but the player Hull's season has turned on is a winger of twenty-four whom they bought from Farense in Portugal two summers ago, the son of Lakhdar Belloumi, the Algeria international of the eighties. In his first autumn in England Hull announced that Belloumi had suffered an ACL injury and would miss the remainder of the 2024–25 season. He came back for the promotion run, has started all five league games this season, scored both of Hull's goals at Stamford Bridge within six minutes of each other and set up Cho's at Newcastle. Hull Live's count is two goals and two assists, the most shots in the squad, and one number that tells you what sort of winger he is: no forward in the top-flight has made more than the 16 tackles the 24-year-old has this term. That is the whole of Jakirović's method in one player.

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The break was kind to him. He made his debut for Algeria during it and played all three games, scoring against Burundi and then with a free kick against Niger on Tuesday, and he comes back to Hull as a man who has arrived rather than one who is arriving. Hull Live wants him assessed before kick-off, having not forgotten the knee. If he plays, he plays on the right against whoever Everton put at left-back, and the whole of the fortnight's team news was about who that is. Mykolenko after a doubtful fortnight, or Garner, a midfielder, or Maitland-Niles switched across: Belloumi is the reason that question matters to Hull's supporters as much as to Everton's. Their board expects to lose him in January. Evertonians know that feeling better than most. He is on the bench this afternoon, after three games for Algeria in a fortnight, so the four hundred words above are about a man Everton will meet at about the hour.

Where the Game Is Won

In the first quarter of an hour and the last. Hull have gone behind inside seven minutes in both of their last two away games and have not conceded at home at all, so the afternoon's shape depends on which Hull turns up and whether Everton, who scored inside fifteen minutes only against Ipswich this season, can make it the first. Jakirović has spent the fortnight on a quicker start. Everton's last away game began with twenty minutes under siege at Tottenham that Moyes afterwards said was not the plan. The likelier drama is the other end of the afternoon: Hull came from two down to one at Newcastle with Cho off the bench and "didn't surrender", and Everton have watched the last ten minutes of every game this season through their fingers, including the one against ten men.

Then the left. Belloumi against whoever Everton put at left-back was the match-up the fortnight made, and neither man is in it at two o'clock: Mykolenko is not in the squad, Belloumi is on the bench, and Branthwaite, a centre-half, has the position against Sorba Thomas, a winger who crosses rather than runs. The cost of August's window was always going to be paid in one position on one afternoon, and East Yorkshire on the second Sunday of October looks like the place, with the bill arriving when Belloumi comes on. The reward is on the same touchline, where Grealish runs at Coyle with the full-back arriving behind, and where the fouls that Hull give away by the dozen will be given.

And the dead ball, because the Guardian says so and the record agrees. Everton's equaliser at Bournemouth came from a corner and so did the goal taken off them against Ipswich. Ipswich's manager said afterwards that his side hold their line at corners so that the man blocking the goalkeeper is offside, and Hull's staff will have watched the clip. Hull defend with three centre-halves, Tzolakis, who has not conceded at home, and McBurnie, who comes back, and give away ten free kicks a game, several of them within range of Garner's foot and Tarkowski's head. Whether Everton put a man on Tzolakis, and whether Salisbury, who stood at a monitor for three minutes in May and chose not to change his mind, lets him stay there, is worth the first corner's attention.

The Mood on the Board

TPF has not been talking about Hull. In three weeks and some eleven hundred and fifty posts the match came up a handful of times, and the one thread called "Team For Sunday" ran to five posts, the first of which named ten players and the second of which pointed this out. There is no prediction thread, nobody has posted a score and nobody has mentioned the fair, a train, a hotel or the price of a ticket. Iroegbunam's name does not appear at all. On a board that spent August on the man's hamstring and his fee this is not forgetfulness. It is what TPF does with a game it expects to win, which is not to say so out loud in case the club hears.

What it talked about from Friday morning was the sale, and it split three ways. The first camp was glad: "After the way they behaved over the summer, good," within a quarter of an hour of the news, and later a longer indictment that the owners had never met the manager or the chief executive face to face and had never been to a match but had been in Scotland last week. The second was grudgingly fair, holding that they are "probably the best owners we've had in 30+ years", that they stabilised the club, refinanced the debt and finished the stadium, and are now making a sensible business decision. The third was the pragmatists, who think the next owner will inherit the same arithmetic as the last and that "the league rules are what holds us back - not the owners". The names went round as names do: Amanda Staveley, with the reply that every rumour seems to come from one source; a fear of another 777; a hope for a one-club owner. On the manager the board was warm in a way it has not been for a while. The settled line was that there is nobody better to have in the dugout through another upheaval than Moyes, and a thread called "He's not perfect" consisted of a video and the sentence "I'd rather he was our manager in what looks like another turbulent time than most others". Friday's press conference itself hardly reached the board except through the Times, whose account of the summer it treated as gospel.

Before Friday the fortnight's business was England, the City verdict and the calendar. Pickford's omission against Spain opened a thread on whether Tuchel had dumped him, split between those who think his time is up and those who think he is first choice by a country mile; the third game settled it for most. Mykolenko's injury was greeted with the thought that the break was so interminably long he would be fit again by Hull, which is roughly how it has turned out. The closed-doors game against Blackburn, in which Everton were awarded a penalty, drew the week's best line: a doubt that the report could be genuine. The real anger was the fixture list. The derby moved to a Sunday at noon, Coventry to a Friday night and Brentford away to a Monday, and one member added up November and found Monday, Friday, Monday, Sunday noon. "Every game for me is like a military operation of trains and sometimes accommodation," said another. And on Saturday evening the board opened a poll on which of Liverpool and Manchester City it wanted to win this afternoon. Of sixty-six votes none went to the neighbours on the grounds that City deserved crushing, seven called it a lose-lose, and not one reply mentioned Everton's own game, which kicks off two and a half hours earlier.

The stories this fortnight are about not going rather than going. A father and two sons, all season-ticket holders, worked through the holidays and the television moves and found that the first game all three can attend together is 5 December. Another member had booked a ticket, a hotel and the trains to take a four-year-old daughter to her first match, Coventry at home, and learned two days later that it had gone to a Friday night and the ticket could not be refunded. A third did the stadium tour on the Sunday after Ipswich and reported that walking out to Z-Cars was special, and when asked whether there was any booing, said only from a junior member of the party. On TPF the ground is the easy part. Getting a child into it is the project.

The Mood on Their Board

Hull's supporters, read on the Hull City board of not606, opened their match thread for this game on 20 September, three weeks early, and it has run to seventeen pages and well past three hundred posts, most of them not about the match. A long break does strange things to a thread; this one visited Hiroshima, shingles jabs and Keats, and one member observed that nobody does thread drift like Tigers fans. When it came back to football it was in good heart with its own side and nervous about the opponent, which is the right way round. The head coach is "Serge" to them and draws no criticism at all, which for a promoted club's manager in October is a kind of love. Their worries are their own: a striker who has not scored, a right-back position they had started calling the new left-back until Norton-Cuffy came back, and Iroegbunam, whose injury they read as a recurrence of something he arrived with. "Everton knew he's made of glass" was the first reaction in September. When his name moved to "available" on Friday afternoon the board was less relieved than suspicious: ruled out for months at Everton, then weeks, now no time at all, and one member thought it mind games and doubted he would make the bench.

About Everton they are respectful and faintly nettled. The dominant view is that Everton have a very decent squad and will rightly be firm favourites, and that this is their hardest game of the season so far, a phrase one of them amended to "our hardest since our last". The nettle is our board, or boards like it: several had read Evertonians calling it only Hull and did not care for it, and one argued fairly that Hull would say the same about Lincoln. The sale went round on Friday afternoon with a cheerful lack of sympathy, and then a thread of price arithmetic in which Hull concluded that Everton are worth more than the asking but carry the debt. The tactical points are sharp: a hope that McBurnie presses Pickford's kicking, which they watched for England and did not think much of, and a wish to see Tzolakis protected at corners. The predictions run from 1–1 and 2–2 through "whoever scores first wins" to City by something to nil, and a Friday post declaring it "must win tomorrow" drew the reply that it was a seven-pointer at least. The fair came up only to tease: Everton's supporters will be able to look at all the rides they cannot go on, because the fair does not work on Sundays. Parking will be a nightmare, another expects, with everyone who normally uses Walton Street looking elsewhere, and the sensible plan is to go early and waste time in the pub.

Their stories are the better kind. One supporter flies to Rhodes from Manchester at twenty past five this afternoon, has booked the car park from one o'clock and intends to get through bag drop and security fast enough to watch the whole game on a phone at the gate, having missed the break's football for work. Another was up at two in the morning in a far time zone and posted at dawn, our time, to wonder how the team plays after an international break. A third has not seen a home game yet because of a wedding and a holiday and has worked out that the first Saturday afternoon at home is Ipswich on 31 October; told it was his own fault for getting married, he replied that luckily it was not his wedding. And one member announced that he would miss the game because he would be in Tokyo, was reminded that it is a home game, and concluded that it was too late to delete and he would have to take the flak. There are boards on which that would have been the end of him. On this one he was still posting a fortnight later.

Elsewhere

The Manchester City case has moved from a finding to an appeal. The Premier League confirmed on 29 September that an independent commission had found City guilty of breaching its financial rules between 2009–10 and 2017–18; City appealed, calling the ruling unsafe, and the punishment is to be decided separately. The BBC's Phil McNulty, previewing this afternoon's game at Anfield, has them arriving "continuing to maintain their innocence after launching an appeal against the decision of an independent commission to deliver a guilty verdict", with the league weighing a sanction while the appeal runs beside it. On the timetable the BBC reported this: "If the appeal adheres to strict Premier League guidelines, it should be concluded by Christmas Day, with a verdict to follow in the early part of 2027."

The Everton angle needs no drawing, and Moyes drew it anyway on Friday. Everton were docked ten points in November 2023 for a breach of the same rules, the biggest deduction in the league's history; it became six on appeal in February 2024, and two more went that April for a second breach, the first time a top-flight club had been docked twice in a season. The whole of that took one season. Asked about City, Moyes said: "I hope it's not just Everton who are getting picked on here. I think we get picked on by the referees and every other area as well." Then, in fairness, he added that City had raised the level of the league with the football they played. TPF's poll on this afternoon's other game is the supporters' version of the same two sentences.

What It Means

For the table, more than an October game usually does. A win takes Everton to twelve points and, depending on Liverpool and City at half past four, to somewhere between third and sixth, and ends an away run that has gone on long enough to become a subject. Defeat swaps the two clubs over, puts a promoted side above Everton in the table everyone looks at, and gives a week of back pages to the only other Everton story there is, which as of Friday has a price on it. A draw is the result both managers would have taken on Saturday night and neither will admit to on Sunday.

For the football, the same question as every week, put to a stubborn opponent. Everton have scored more than twice in a league game once this season and have not needed to. Hull have not conceded at home. When two such records meet something gives, and it is usually the crowd's patience. The people in the away end will have come to East Yorkshire on a railway that was going to be on strike and then was not, via Brighouse, on the one day the fair is shut, to watch a side that does not score against a side that does not concede. A goal off somebody's chest would be the least surprising thing that could happen.

And for the club, it is the first game of a season that now has a sale running through it. Moyes has been here before, in the other sense: the sensible choice a big club settled for, now asked to keep a team unbeaten while nobody can tell him what January holds. "When you're not getting much direction on what we've got, it's not easy to work out where we're going," he said on Friday. The team has so far been the owners' best argument for buying the club. It would be a shame to stop now, with the brochure just out.

Sources & Caveats

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