We all knew who he was. We’d heard. Word was getting out. The rest of you may have realised who he was when he blasted a free kick into a defensive wall against (I think?) Tottenham in an FA Youth Cup game. He volleyed it straight back first time and nearly broke the net. It was televised so our not so secret ‘secret’ was now definitely not a secret anymore. He followed it up by scoring against Villa in the same competition and revealing his ‘ONCE A BLUE, ALWAYS A BLUE’ T-shirt. We all fell in love with a kid who had yet to kick a ball for the first team. Genuine heroes had been thin on the ground for me since Gary Lineker left when I was six years old. We’d resorted to cult heroes. Kanchelskis only performed for a season, so I’m not counting him. This kid was going to stay with us forever, maybe going to Barcelona after he’d won the league with us. Whatever happened, he was one of us. And that was never going to change, was it? What we did know was that despite him only being 16, he’d be playing a major part for us next season.
There were rumours abound that Moyes had already wanted to include him the previous season, but Rooney’s school had blocked it. Imagine running around Goodison not long after turning 15. I turned 15 in 1995. I’d just left Everton’s Centre of Excellence (none of that academy caper for me) to pursue a career in smoking rocky bongs, glugging cans of Oranjeboom—eight for a fiver from Duncan’s offy on Walton Road—and pretending to be in a band. I celebrated the 15th anniversary of my birth on the 9th of September 1995. We lost 3–2, at home, to a Lee Sharpe-inspired Manchester Utd that day. I lived sixty seconds away from Goodison, and I just used to buzz off our area coming to life every other week. For half a day every few Saturdays, thousands of people descended on our streets. Streets they’d usually have no business on. Pubs earned enough in a day to keep them going until the next match. Cars parked in our street and blocked our makeshift footy pitches. People with funny accents drank in our pubs. Strangers with questionable haircuts ate from our chippies. We loved it. Many an opportunity arose on match day, from laughing at Norwich fans’ clothes to Wimbledon players walking down our street, high-fiving us after we’d just beat them to stay up in 94, and overcharging Southampton mushes to leave their minibuses outside our houses… then using them to practice our free kick routines against. We won’t mention the selling of Gary Abletts to Welsh Evertonians. Anyway, my 15th birthday. A pivotal event that, with hindsight, told me quite a lot about ‘the way I am’.