Tommy Martin: Seamus Coleman has spent too long fronting up for the failings of others
LONDON, ENGLAND - MARCH 07: Sergio Reguilon of Tottenham Hotspur is challenged by Seamus Coleman of Everton during the Premier League match between Tottenham Hotspur and Everton at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on March 07, 2022 in London, England. (Photo by Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
Monday night football is a terrible idea because Monday is a terrible night for football. Football should be played in the joyful release of the weekend, or on the theatrical stage of midweek. Monday night is for the mundane and the domestic, a time to fidget and reorder. You can feel it in the flaccid atmosphere at Monday night matches. Everybody is preoccupied – about that meeting in the morning, that bill they can’t pay, that look off their loved one as they headed off to a football match on a Monday night.
Sky Sports have dollied up the concept in recent years with Neville and Carragher and their all-seeing eyes, a Busby Berkeley extravaganza of analysis and opinion that serves to distract from the actual games themselves, stale leftovers from the weekend.
This week’s version was even worse because it forced us to watch the Republic of Ireland captain enduring a prolonged public punishment, as if he was re-enacting the Stations of the Cross on a chilly night in North London. Seamus Coleman was hardly alone among the bedraggled ranks of Evertonians but it was hard not to ache for the saintly captain, suffering for his club’s sins.
The agony started early, when the young Tottenham wing-back Ryan Sessegnon scuttled around him like a cocker spaniel evading a bin lorry, whipping in a cross that Michael Keane wearily turned into his own net. Coleman had been just a little too slow and a little too late. Age has good manners, it arrives first with a hint.
The second and third goals were no fault of Coleman’s but bore the classic stamp of a Frank Lampard team. Half-baked notions of front-foot football betrayed by sketchy defensive structures, roomy gaps for an opposition playmaker to stride through like a celebrity architect considering where to place a mezzanine nook. On each occasion our Seamus arrived on the scene to inspect the damage, while in the dugout Frank adopted the look of a man disowning his errant children.
Things got worse in the second half. Unbowed, twice Coleman prodded forward passes to teammates in the hope of cranking up some spluttering resistance. Twice the passes were intercepted, the first ending with Coleman prone on his face in front of goal as Sergio Reguilon scored Tottenham’s fourth, the second with Matt Doherty – cruel irony, having a wonderful game – dinking a sweet, drifting paper plane of a ball into the space Coleman had vacated, the full-back returning just in time to witness Harry Kane’s regal sidefoot volley.
In the Monday Night Football studio Jamie Carragher, a childhood Evertonian, rained down more punishment on a team now mired in the relegation battle. “Seamus Coleman, I actually feel sorry for him, he's been a great full-back for Everton, but right now this is happening far too much, where people are just running in behind him…And that goes back to Everton's recruitment, that Seamus Coleman's still playing right now."
Carragher was right. Scroll through the dreg ends of the brief Rafa Benitez era and the even briefer Big Dunc interregnum and the sight of Coleman scampering vainly after athletic younger men is a recurring motif. That scamper used to be his trademark – it would whisk him into threatening attacking positions and back into his defensive berth, a whirr of energy that beguiled Everton fans from the moment he stepped onto the Goodison turf back in 2009.
Everything about Coleman spoke to Evertonians. ‘Sixty grand, sixty grand, Seamus Coleman’ they sang in reference to the pocket change David Moyes had tossed Sligo Rovers for a bundle of rough promise, just turned 20. For that sixty grand they got more than a decade of that scamper, the power source for the good times, galvanising the team and whipping up the supporters, who wanted their football raw and real and enthusiastic and honest. Coleman, basically.
Cuco Martina, Djibril Sidibe, Jonjoe Kenny, Nathan Patterson – as Carragher notes, Everton haven’t exactly thrown the next Cafu in his path at any stage, but Coleman faced down all rivals for his place nonetheless. The broken leg that he suffered playing for Ireland in 2017, being left out of Stephen Kenny’s initial selections – just more of life’s opponents to be scampered around.
Since 2019 he has been Everton’s captain too, one who does the job with the same selfless concern for the greater good and his teammates’ welfare as with his country. Coleman is reportedly a friendly conduit for new signings, helping them with houses and schools and having them over for dinner. Stories of his charity are legion: he seems to be constantly tossing unsolicited thousands here and there towards GoFundMe appeals for sick kids or local good causes.
But too often it feels like Coleman’s role for club and country has been to front up and defend the failings of others. At the bitter end of Martin O’Neill’s Ireland days he would insist the lads had full faith in management and that it was up to the players to do the job on the field. Ever the brave sergeant, drawing fire so others can escape.
At Everton he has to explain away the great swerving incompetence of the Farshad Moshiri ownership, the chaotic off-field hirings and firings, the comings and goings of managers and sporting directors, the swollen ranks of expensive and underperforming signings and the vague sense of weirdness that may or may not have something to do with the lurking presence of Alisher Usmanov, the club’s recently sanctioned sponsor and alleged great mate of Putin.
Through all this and into the latest stage under the faintly ludicrous Lampard, Coleman is out front, taking it on the chin for the team, pointing to the redemptive qualities of knuckling down in training. And it comes to a point – Monday night being that point – when you wonder what on earth he has done to deserve this, to be lying with his face down in the north London turf, glancing up at a gurning, helpless Jordan Pickford, over and over again?
After everything Coleman has given, all that honesty, professionalism, leadership and smiling decency, can it really have come to this, the prospect of late career relegation, the first in Everton’s history?
Surely he really is too good to go down?
