Meyler resetting his goals after being to Hull and back
THE Meyler family could never be accused of lacking either ambition or motivation.
As Ireland midfielder David scrolled through his phone deep into the Parisien night, an email pinged from his father.
“He’d about a hundred things in it from the match!” Meyler marvels. “What did I play? Thirty minutes?”
You suggest he should have responded in kind with some advice of his own given Cork’s jitters in Thurles the day before. “Yeah,” he laughs at mention of John’s hurlers, “stick the ball over the bar!”
Meyler (pictured) has had to reassess his aims of late; now 28, he found himself at a club, Hull City, who were drifting listlessly and threatening to cause him to do the same.
They were good to him, particularly when they treated Meyler sympathetically in the aftermath of his wife’s tragic mis-carriage late last year.
But, when he might have been expecting talks on a contract extension to ensue after Christmas, he instead discovered that there would be none, save an offer of a new, presumably less attractive, deal. “The manner in which it was dealt with was disappointing,” he says. “The club talked about respect but I thought I probably wasn’t shown the respect that I deserved. I found out my contract hadn’t been extended through the press officer, which probably isn’t ideal.” And so a clutch of clubs, from Leeds to Aston Villa and Reading, vie to secure his services; all hoping to demonstrate that their aims can dovetail with his, the primary one a return to the highest level of the game. Even though just 28, time waits for no man.
“Whether it be Premier League, Championship or whatever, I want ambition. I want to win something, I want to achieve something in my career,” he says.
Which could be applied to Everton under Sam Allardyce; Seamus Coleman will be hoping his yearning for success, too, can be satisfied as Marco Silva takes the reins of the all too sleepy giant.
“At club level, I desperately want to win something, we need to do that,” he says of a club whose trophy drought now extends to 1995.
“It’s far too long. I want this group to qualify for the Euros and I want to succeed at Everton.”
Coleman cedes the armband tomorrow to the retiring John O’Shea but Meyler insists there will be nothing testimonial about the team’s approach.
“First and foremost, yes it is John’s farewell. But for me and I know the way the manager thinks, we win the game, then the performance and then ‘thanks for everything John.’
“And John would be the same. We’re not coming to clap and wave. We need to win and if we do that, it puts us all in good form and John gets the send-off he deserves.”