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WHEN the axe finally fell, it should have dawned on Roberto Martinez he had become the antithesis of everything he admires.
Here was a manager in possession of one of the more attractive jobs in England’s top flight and yet, by the end of an underwhelming season, he had carelessly given it away.
As Everton’s campaign hurtled towards the point of no return, the final weeks of the Spaniard’s reign exposed much about his state of mind.
In an attempt to smooth away the inconsistencies between what he felt was his side’s diabolical home form and their away performances, Martinez sought to recreate the spirit of a side on their travels.
Before Everton’s final two matches at Goodison Park this season, they eschewed home comforts – staying in a Liverpool city centre hotel the previous night and arriving at the ground on a coach with tracksuits, not club suits.
A draw and a win in those games might offer some vindication but, in many respects, it is the fact he came up with the idea in the first place that shines a light on his tenure.
The first instinct was not to tinker with his team’s tactical approach to elicit an improvement, getting the ball forward with a little more crashbang-wallop as Everton sides of the past have done. Changing the dress code would do it.
There is something to admire about Martinez’s unflinching belief in his methods and, having hired him in the first place, Everton might have been naive to expect him to abandon the principles upon which he has forged a career in management.
They do not preclude him from future success, though perhaps it might not be in the Premier League.
Football is about winning and the bottom line is that he did not do that nearly enough. Of his past 75 games, Everton have won just 22. In his first season, he won 21 matches. Possession rather than points grew tiresome for players and supporters alike.
His legacy will be the overhaul he has implemented at Everton’s Finch Farm training ground and the tweaks overseen at youth level, but he needed more on the pitch than nearmisses in domestic cups.
Abject defeats to Leicester and Sunderland within the past week brought grim confirmation of a team who had stopped believing. Whatever the illfeeling towards the manager, none of those players can say they have represented themselves in the best possible light.
The disconnect has been a long time in the making. Sometimes players need to work out the problem for themselves, dig each other out, scream and shout in each other’s faces behind closed doors and hear a different voice. The sort of thing you can imagine Leicester’s players might do.
There have been rumours of bust-ups between assistant manager Graeme Jones and players when tensions erupted as the season unravelled, yet that has not been the norm over the past three years.
When defender John Stones started to take one team-mate to task at half-time in a game, complaining he was not offering enough movement for those seeking to play out from the back, Martinez intervened and quietened the youngster down rather than allowing the debate to flourish.
Stones will unfairly be viewed as a symbol of the regression Everton have endured following Martinez’s first season, when he inherited strong foundations from David Moyes and guided