A parlous financial state, 132 days since a home win at Goodison Park

Take a mile’s walk up Liverpool’s old Dock Road, leaving the Liver Building behind, and you get a vivid sense of how Everton will take a place in the historic fabric of the city, if they manage to make it to the stadium being built for them.

Carved into the historic, listed dock wall, built by French prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars, are the names of the mighty old shipyards, Trafalgar, Victoria, Nelson, with the year, ‘1848’, and there is the moving simplicity of the turquoise plaque marking the 150th anniversary of Ireland’s Great Famine. ‘Through these gates passed most of the 1,300,000 Irish migrants who fled the famine and “took the ship” to Liverpool, in the years 1845-52.’

Other great clubs who moved to a purpose-built stadium trade soul for space but Everton’s Bramley Moore Dock stadium, where glass panels were being delicately placed on the main entrance as contractors’ wagons rolled through in the sunshine on Wednesday, is at the City of Liverpool’s spiritual core and great seafaring past.

Coffee places and a micro-brewery have already sprung up amid the redbrick warehouses on the Dock Road but if Everton make it, they will be the heartbeat of the most significant regeneration plan since the legendary rebirth of the Albert Dock, three miles south, in the early 1980s.

All those hopes and aspirations are shrouded in uncertainty this weekend. The club are financially imperilled, surviving on external lines of credit despite selling their best players to bring in £120million this summer – and now living with the consequences of that on the field.

It’s been 132 days since the euphoria of a 1-0 win over Bournemouth at Goodison Park which kept the club up on the last day of last season - prompting vows of ‘never again’