Spare a thought for the Tennessee Toffees who made a return trip of over 8,000 miles to watch Everton’s defeat to Wolverhampton Wanderers but these USA-based fans are used to making long treks to support their beloved Blues.
The usual matchday routine for the group of over 20 Evertonians is meeting in a pub called The Lost Paddy on Spence Lane, Nashville, but they decamped en masse to Goodison Park to watch their team in the flesh on Sunday.
Speaking before the game, trip organiser Clay Trainum told the ECHO: “We’ve been planning to bring a group for over for about two-and-a-half years and we finally got to a point where we could.
“Obviously Covid played a big role for rescheduling over and over again.
“I was always looking around March around spring break because I work in a university and we had some kids in our group who were university kids and this was the only (weekend) home game of the month.
“One of the great things is that it’s our core group, the people who are at the pub every week, are there.
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“We cancelled our watch party in Nashville as almost everyone is here.”
Although Clay had previously been to Goodison Park – he quipped how he’d had “the full Everton experience before” having watched a side unbeaten at home in the calendar year lose 1-0 at home to bottom-of-the-table Sunderland on Boxing Day 2013 before seeing Seamus Coleman score “a worldie” in a 2-1 win over Southampton three days later – this was a first pilgrimage for Bryan Robbins.
Casting his eyes on ‘The Old Lady’ for the first time, he said: “It’s definitely bigger in person than you’d ever feel on the television. Every step you take, it’s grand.
“It’s my first trip to Liverpool and my wife and I had the chance to spend the whole week here and spent time in the city centre, absorbing all the music culture and everything and that was a really fun time.
“We also had the stadium tour on Friday and that was beautiful seeing behind the scenes in the locker rooms, it’s been beautiful.”
Bryan, who makes a 180-mile journey on a regular basis with his wife from their home in Huntsville, Alabama, just to watch Everton play on television with the rest of the Tennessee Toffees in Nashville, has been following the Blues since 2014.
He cites Tim Howard’s exploits at the 2014 World Cup combined with a major television deal between NBC Sports and the Premier League that year with piquing his interest in the club – although he reveals he’s primarily “a Seamus Coleman man” himself.
Bryan said: “Watching it with a group that cares about the team and the same things as us is nice and you get the feeling going.”
Clay’s Everton connections go back further though and have a more unusual origin.
He explained: “My home town is Evansville, Indiana. My favourite piece of trivia that a lot of Everton fans don’t know about is that in 1990, Evansville, a small school of around 2,000 kids, made it to a national semi-final in college soccer.
“Our centre-forward in that game and our all-time leading goalscorer was David Weir.
“Obviously he never played in that position in his professional career but after graduating, went back to Scotland and played for Falkirk and Hearts before becoming a captain at Everton.
“He was the first player from an American college to play in a World Cup (in 1998) but that was the hook that got me locked in.”
For the Tennessee Toffees though, going to a home match at Goodison is in sharp contrast to what they’re used to.
Clay said: “For a lot of Evertonians in the United States, it’s different for us to be in an environment where there are more of us.
“Usually it’s like, here’s one guy here and one guy here, so I’ve been telling everyone whose first time it is that it will be crazy because we normally have 20 in the pub and say ‘what a great day it is’, Bryan was there when we had 3,000 in Florida last summer, but now there are going to be about 38,000.”
Unfortunately, the final result, a 1-0 defeat, Everton’s eighth in their nine Premier League fixtures so far in 2022, couldn’t bring the trip to a happy end for the visiting US Blues.
As Bryan admitted, the team’s current malaise is baffling for fans from both near and far.
He said: “Seeing the talent we’ve got on the pitch, we’ve got world-class strikers, midfielders and even defenders somewhere in there but we need to get them on the same page.”
