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| LIVING THE STREAM ... Everton players cool off during training under Moyes |
David Moyes is to fill the mightiest shoes in football charged with continuing a dynasty which has dominated the English game for two decades.
Even the departing Alex Ferguson insists his successor must stamp his own style on the club, rather than trying to become a clone of the game’s greatest-ever gaffer.
With Moyes at the helm, there is no danger of him falling into that trap. The flame-haired Scotsman is too
single-minded for that.
That was proved when he was still a young player at Celtic and went on a coaching course at Largs to get his badges while most of his team-mates were more concerned with a round of golf or a day at the races.
So any Manchester United superstar expecting a slackening of the reins when Fergie moves upstairs is in for a rude awakening.
At Everton, Moyes’ ‘Horseshoe Runs’ are infamous.
The gruelling sprint session so called because of the course it covers regularly results in players retching as they finish, their wobbling legs struggling to keep them upright.
Departing skipper Phil Neville, who could follow Moyes to Old Trafford as a coach, revealed it is a sight every player dreaded... the manager poking his head around the door and revealing ‘It’s the horseshoe today’.
Neville said: “It filled me with dread and I’ll never forget when we first did it. We’d had a poor-ish start to the season and a few lads were on international break.
“Me and Mikel Arteta came in and the gaffer said, ‘Right, horseshoe today’. Afterwards Mikel lay on the dressing-room floor and I was bent over cursing in the corner, calling him the worst manager in the league.
“His method is to push you to your limits in training and then the match is easy.
“It’s a run that sorts the men from the boys, but everyone finished it, it’s like an army boot camp. But if there was ever a time I thought, ‘I could probably shoot you today’ it was then.”
Yet that is the way it is with Moyes building a squad jam-packed with spirit and togetherness through adversity and hard times.
His methods will not sit well with some players at United. But you can be certain those figures will not be pulling on a red shirt for too long.
There will be tough decisions, ones which will irk some but ones Moyes will be more than happy to make. He proved that by making Neville his skipper, a season after arriving and with Blues fans still sceptical about being led by a former United player.
Moyes knew it and was right. Just as he has been so often over the past 11 years at Goodison.
Forget the idea he is defensive-minded. He is pragmatic and shapes his team and tactics depending on the opposition.
If that means adopting a stifling, smothering approach, it is one he will take. But now he will have a team littered with superstars and rather than changing the United style, he will relish having a side good enough to play that way every week.
And while cynics will point to a lack of silverware and European experience, even Everton know there remain only five serious contenders so to that end Moyes has been an unqualified success, punching above his weight rather than falling short.
There will be times when it does not all go to plan, yet that is when the new United chief will really come to the fore.
Eight years ago Everton had a shocking start, losing eight games and crashing out of two European competitions.
Moyes then rebuilt the side, never wavering from his belief he was working on the right lines.
Of course he has adapted his ideas over the years and while he will put his new charges through hell at times, these days he knows when to take the foot off the gas as well.
Not long into his Goodison tenure, players would regularly complain they were flogged too hard, too often. It was not a complaint about his training, just the amount of it.
It was nothing for the Moyes of old to give his stars only a couple of days off in the opening months of the season nowadays he knows they can be ‘over-trained’.
That might not offer much solace to those United hotshots when they are jelly-legged after one of his hard-line sessions. But deep down they will all know that for Moyes, second-best is just first-placed loser. The DNA of the team is sure to remain packed with stardust.
Yet under Moyes it will be equally crucial to be packed with spirit, determination and willingness to work for each other.
Never will the name United have carried such literal significance as it will under the new boss.
And woe betide anyone who does not buy into that.
Source: The Sun
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