English FA Premiership: Dominic Fifield talks to the Everton striker as he prepares to return to the club that reduced him to tears when they sold him
James Beattie was in the back-swing of a tee-shot when the shrill of his mobile phone heralded the death of a dream. The forward's hurried answer greeted by the Lancashire burr of Blackburn Rovers' secretary Tom Finn. "He just said they'd sold me to Southampton and that I'd be meeting their manager Dave Jones in the next couple of days," Beattie recalls. "I'd never even been asked if I wanted to go. I remember I just started crying."
Clad in his Everton training gear with a scab healing on his right knee and a once prosperous career beginning to revive, Beattie could smile yesterday at that trauma as he contemplated his latest return to the club he has supported for 20 years. He travels to Ewood Park this afternoon some seven years after Roy Hodgson sanctioned his sale against his knowledge with form and fitness steadily creeping back into his game and with hopes swelling he could yet earn a place in England's World Cup squad.
That remains a lofty ambition though Everton's leading scorer this term - he has two of the side's five Premiership goals going into December - has never been short of self-confidence. His outlook was arguably reinforced by leaving family and friends as a 20-year-old to venture to Southampton. At the time the move was daunting. In retrospect it cost Rovers and made Beattie.
"I was absolutely distraught," said Beattie. "When something like that hits you, it's hard to see what's going to happen next. I'd supported Blackburn all my life, had a season ticket on the terraces and the day we won the championship under Kenny Dalglish (1995) is still the best thing that's happened to me in football outside what I've achieved. I was starting my YTS the following year, so that success was something I wanted to be a part of some day. So to leave them felt as if that was it.
"It had come out of the blue. I'd had a really good season in the reserves the year before, I'd made occasional appearances for the first team and I was just intent upon breaking into the senior squad more regularly. And then they sold me. I had no say in the matter. Southampton was miles away and I'd always lived at home but during the first week down there I turned the move into a personal challenge.
"I wanted to prove myself and, by the end of the season, I'd been voted player of the year. Looking back, it was the best move I ever made. Hindsight is wonderful, isn't it? I wouldn't have had the same chances at Blackburn, with Chris Sutton, Kevin Gallacher, Martin Dahlin and Kevin Davies ahead of me. So it helped me develop as a player and as a person as well."
Everton deflected interest from Aston Villa to sign the finished article in January for an initial £4.8 million fee to rise to a club record £6 million. Southampton had transformed Beattie into an England international with four caps and 67 club goals in four seasons. David Moyes hoped his arrival would establish Everton - a giddy fourth at the time - as one of the Premiership's genuine contenders, at least for consistent European qualification. He was also a player who, despite suffering a broken toe at the start of last season and a calf niggle when he arrived from St Mary's, had no history of long-term injury.
That soon changed. Beattie's impact last term was frustrated by tweaks, twists, a lack of fitness and the first red card of his career for a head-butt on Chelsea's William Gallas on his seventh appearance. He mustered only one Premiership goal, the size of his transfer fee heaping more pressure on his shoulders with every fluffed performance.
"It was hard," he said. "I'd been playing well at Southampton before the injury but, when I came here, I wasn't fully fit. The injuries never stopped after that and that made it difficult. But everyone's been great to me . . . Hopefully, now I'm fit, I can repay them. You have to keep the belief, even at the lowest points. If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will. I knew that, once I was fit, I'd score goals and I'm starting to do that now."
Beattie took up yoga in an attempt to stave off the muscular strains hampering his progress. Everton went back to basics to turn their own season around, the obduracy of old earning them three 1-0 wins in their past four matches to lift the gloom and haul them free of the relegation zone. With Beattie's goals and bustling energy up front, there are grounds for some optimism.
That stretches to the possibility of forcing his way back into Sven-Goran Eriksson's plans. "I haven't given up hope of going to the World Cup," he added, though he has not featured for the England team since the 3-2 defeat to Denmark two years ago. "I still want to do that and the only way it will come about is if I keep working hard . . . I know what I have to do, just as Everton know what we have to do."
A first Beattie goal at Ewood Park today could maintain momentum for both.
Guardian Service
