Arteta leads Everton to seventh heaven

(match report written for Everton vs Sunderland, 25 Nov 2007)

Sunderland manager Roy Keane had spoken in the pre match build-up that Everton, with it’s policy of allowing the manager time to build a squad and bring through young players, were a model of what he wanted to achieve in the North East.
On Saturday’s display his side may be a million miles away from the breathtaking attacking football that graced Goodison Park, but for Moyes, his five year plan is beginning to bear fruit.
This was perhaps Moyes best performance since he took over the job in 2002, and there is now an undoubted attacking prowess to complement the already steady defensive play that have become a hallmark of his sides.
Now seven games unbeaten in all competitions, Everton look full of confidence and appear to have goalscorers in every area of the pitch.
Three midfielders were amongst the goals but it was the virtuoso attacking performance from Mikel Arteta that caught the eye.
Arteta, who did not score but came close on several occasions, was at the centre of everything that Everton did and each flick, stepover and finely measured pass was met by wild acclaim from the crowd.
The Spaniard moved this week to deny reports of him signing for Athletico Madrid in the January transfer window and while that is encouraging news for Evertonians, it’s still obvious that without him, they would be a shadow of the team they are threatening to become.

The Nigerian striker Yakubu has endured a rocky start to his career at Everton but he has now found his goalscoring touch with five in the Premiership for his new club.
Many baulked at the fee paid out for the player when he arrived from Middlesborough but his prolific nature in front of goal is now beginning to show.
He got the first of the afternoon on 12 minutes when his shot took a deflection off Danny Higginbotham into the roof of the net.
Five minutes later and it was two when Arteta flicked a ball in from the edge of the box for Phil Neville who teed it for Tim Cahill. Cahill, holding off two defenders, duly poked it into the bottom corner past Craig Gordon.
Cahill’s return to the side after a metatarsal injury has seen the Australian midfielder score six goals in six starts.
His constant threat in the penalty area has seen him being used as a second striker and with his constant harrying and an eye for a goal, it is a tactic that is paying out for Everton.
Another recent star has been the on-loan winger Steven Pienaar.
His vision put in Nuno Valente on 43 minutes, who then played it back in for the charging South African and without a second thought blasted it into the top corner.
Some of Everton’s goals on Saturday were gifted by the generous Sunderland defence (the hapless Paul McShane was in a particularly philanthropic mood) but this was attacking football at it’s very best.
Despite the exploits of their defence, Sunderland were beginning to grow in confidence in attack with striker Kenwyne Jones making life difficult for the Everton back four but it was Dwight Yorke, playing in midfield, who gave the Black Cats a foothold in the game on the stroke of half-time.
The former Manchester United striker couldn’t miss from 12 yards after Tim Howard parried after saving two Sunderland attempts.

Tim Cahill increased the Everton lead on the hour when he controlled a Joseph Yobo pass, took it past the defender and slotted it into the bottom corner.
Cue the patented corner flag boxing celebration and much kissing of the badge.
Yakubu doubled his tally to make it 5-1 ten minutes later when Arteta got away from his marker from a corner to play a ball into the six yard box where the £11m striker was waiting to finish.
Sunderland fans could only look on in horror as Tim Cahill and Yakubu, both with two goals to their name, were swapped for another fearsome double act in Victor Anichebe and the returning Andy Johnson and it didn’t take long for either to make their mark.
Johnson, in his first appearance after undergoing ankle surgery, scored with what was probably his first touch as he deftly took down a Neville long ball and dinked it over the onrushing Gordon with ten minutes left.
With the Goodison crowd baying for more after Anichebe was denied a penalty, the impetus fell to the excellent Leon Osman to cap the goalscoring off and finally give the overworked scoreboard updater a well deserved tea break.
Osman, who is about to sign a new contract, received the ball just inside the Sunderland area and raced on, jinking past two defenders before slotting it into the bottom right corner of the goal.
Moyes, who joked pre-match that he was ‘focused on coaching and managing his team’ in a jibe at rival Rafa Benitez, described the performance as the team’s best since he became manager.
“Some of our football was fantastic and our passing and movement was just outstanding,” he said. “It is how I have been hoping to get an Everton team playing and I hope we see Everton playing that was more often – hopefully it’s the first of many. Some of our football was fantastic and our passing and movement was just outstanding.”

Meeting Maggie May

Liverpool’s maritime history has left the city with a rich folk music legacy, and perhaps most famous amongst the old sea shanties is ‘Maggie May’. Telling the story of a Victorian prostitute who is sent on the prison boat to Van Diemen’s Land in Tasmania, it has become something of an informal anthem of the city and adorns the name of cafés, inspired musicals and even appears as a brief John Lennon led interlude on the Beatles’ album ‘Let It Be’. The origins of the song and whether ‘dirty robbing no good Maggie May’ even existed at all have been hotly debated topics in recent years but one local film-maker believes that he has finally cracked the mystery.

John Gannon has been researching the beginnings of the song for the past year and he has discovered that not only did Maggie May exist, but that she was a young teenage girl who stood at only 4ft 11 inches tall. The results of his findings will help form the basis of a six part series that he has been commissioned to write currently titled ‘Nelly Ray’.

“The song has been around for a very long time, but it’s impossible to say when it started exactly because so many different versions exist. It began as a foc’sle song and it was used to warn other sailors in other ports that when they came to Liverpool to avoid this Maggie May as she would rob from you. It’s never been known whether or not this was just a traditional standard thing or a representation of life as a prostitute in Victorian Liverpool but through looking into this I’ve managed to discover that she was real and she was only a teenage girl.”

The earliest version of the song appears in the diary of Charles Picknell, a sailor on the convict ship ‘Kains’ which sailed to Van Diemens Land in 1830 and protagonist is ‘Nelly Ray’ rather than Maggie. There are no mentions of a Maggie May on the books but John’s ardous research through court records and transport lists meant that he discovered that a Mary Ann Ray, or ‘Nelly Ray’, travelled to Liverpool as a nine year old girl in 1832 from the village of Magheraberg, County Down with John Ray, a married man from the same town who was her original ‘pimp’. She was born Mary Ann Clark and from many hours searching through census records discovered that she was brought to the city as an orphan and left to work the dirty rat-infested streets of one of the most dangerous ports in the world.

Although the age of consent at the time was 12 years old, Maggie found herself constantly in trouble with the police although as referenced in the song, this was as much for her tendency to steal from her customers and anywhere else she could than for her exploits on the streets. The line in one version of the song about ’skinned so many tailors’ refers to the practice among prostitutes to steal silk and then pawn it at ‘Kelly’s pawnshop, number 9′.

“From court records I’ve found that she was indicted twice for theft and was then sent to Van Diemen’s land, which was the penal colony in Tasmania,” he says. “She was sent at the age of 18 to an even stranger but just as dangerous environment and for me her story of struggle is an immensely interesting film.”

According to the record sheet, her second indictment was for the theft of one watch, one purse, one snuff box, one pocket book and one handkerchief belonging to Richard Chrutchley whilst he was receiving her services and she was only caught after running into a policeman coming on-duty in her escape.

The tragic tale of Maggie May is set against the backdrop of Victorian Liverpool, then in the midst of the industrial revolution boom. The colour and the drama of the overcrowded, filthy streets provides a fascinating setting for the story.

“There is an undoubted romanticism about the place although you definitely wouldn’t want to live there. I want to make the film as accurate to the times as I possibly can and putting it into a visual sense I can hopefully give it the context to give a true glimpse of the people, circumstance and times. There are characters who appear in the story such as priests and doctors who try to give a sense of narrative but who Maggie may not have necessarily crossed paths with. I think one of the most important things to remember about Liverpool is that it has never had a trade. All of these towns around the North West had their own trades but our business was humping things from one ship and putting it on to another, and it’s the main reason why prostitution was rife with the endless stream of sailors getting off one boat and getting on the other. The Scotland Road area was rife with brothels, which were typically rooms run by older women who lived with the girls. It was quite rare for a girl to have a outsider male ‘pimp’ in the way that we understand the term now, but by the time she was put on the prison ship she had the branding of twelve different owners.”

John is also using his research to write a book, explaining that sometimes a drama sometimes has to bend the truth in the name of artistic license. “I didn’t want to make a documentary because when you watch a documentary you usually come out thinking ‘oh, that was interesting’, but I want to make a movie that people will appeal to them emotionally. Movies need to spark a reaction in someone, something that may have been lying dormant for their whole life, but which touches them by end. When you write for an audience, you have to think of them en masse but also as one person and I try and think to myself ‘How do I reach this one person?’”

Film writers often feel that characters become extensions of themselves by the time they have finished writing and John is no exception. He talks about the young Maggie May with parental affection and having spent many long days researching and writing scripts he feels undoubted empathy towards the other characters that he has created. “As a father myself, I feel very protective towards Maggie May. To think that she was only a little girl, and she was little, left to fend on the streets on her own and having to steal and prostitute herself for money is tragic and it’s a miracle she lasted so long. She must have been a little star to have lasted so long in what was a very dangerous place and then to be sent to Tasmania as well.”

John is currently in the process of selling the script to the Australian television company ABC and for his next project he wants to concentrate on her new life in Tasmania. “After her 136 day trip to Hobart on the other side of the world, she lived until she was about 65 and from what I’ve found she marries, has children and constantly finds herself in trouble with the authorities once again. She eventually died in Launceston Invalid Depot of ’senility’. Australia’s history is all about the ships of convicts that came from Britain so I hope that they will be interested in the next part of the film as well.”

John’s background as a writer has taken many forms, from script-writer for BBC Radio 4 comedy programme ‘Weekending’ to magazine articles on crime stories for an array of magazines. His first big break, to his ‘eternal shame’, was a poem that was used in the children’s TV programme ‘Rainbow’. Titled ‘Tea for Two’ and telling the story of a monster who visits a child he met on holiday for a cup of tea, it’s a million miles from Victorian Liverpool but gave him his first shot at writing as a full time career. After a succesful Masters degree for Creative Writing, he has written a variety of well received work, including a script that won the Lynda la Plante award for ‘Best Script’ in 2006. Like many local writers before him, he has found his own home city to be a fascinating canvass to work on.

“The city in the 1800s was such an interesting place, when it was at it’s peak as a world city and a great port. I’ve always wanted to see what the city looked like then and through the story of Maggie I’ll hopefully be able to give viewers what it was really like then.”