Andrew Fifield On The Premiership: David Moyes has extraordinary eyes. They are startlingly blue - the sort of blue sharp enough to cut glass - and when he focuses them on you, it feels as if he is staring into your soul.
In the past, those eyes seemed to serve as proof of Moyes' animal hunger to win. Now, they betray his desperation.
Everton's defeat at Tottenham on Saturday marooned Moyes' team at the foot of the Premiership table, and with the prospect of more pain to come. Chelsea visit Goodison Park on Sunday and unless Moyes has been playing an audacious game of bluff this season, trying to lull Jose Mourinho into a false sense of security by leading his team to six straight defeats, things will get worse before they get better.
It is a sequence which has bruised Everton's pride, and in the blue half of Merseyside, pride counts for much. It is easy to deride Everton as the club that time forgot - a place where club officials still hand out humbugs and the team trot out to the theme of Z Cars - but no Premiership club has a richer heritage. Everton are footballing aristocrats, but they have been turned over by the rabbles from Fulham, Wigan and Portsmouth this season, leaving their supporters and manager with a stinging sense of shame.
However, this is no sudden collapse. The danger signals were pulsing mid-way through last season, when Everton won just five out of their last 16 games to scrape, rather than saunter, into the Champions League. They were still the Premiership's fourth-best team, but the nose-dive was not long in coming.
With cruel irony, the European football that Moyes craved so desperately may yet prove his undoing. Everton's failure to progress to the lucrative and luminous Champions League group stages - not helped, admittedly, by a fiendish draw against Villarreal - and their subsequent Uefa Cup humiliation at Dinamo Bucharest knocked the stuffing out of their season before it had even begun.
Moyes has spoken of the need to "start looking forward", but Everton's confidence has been shattered. Their players could never claim that self-belief was one of their strongest assets. Even last season, Everton's performances were often characterised by nervousness - as if they could not quite believe that their luck would hold. The club's Champions League form masked a relegation-struggle mentality, an unwanted legacy from their 17th-placed finish in 2004.
Now, the demons are returning, and in droves. The qualities which made last season such a triumph - durability, organisation and ruthlessness - have evaporated. The side that kept 15 clean sheets in all competitions last year has managed just one this term, a malaise exemplified by their Nigerian defender Joseph Yobo. He ushered Everton towards defeat with a dreadful error against Manchester United on the first weekend of the season. He, and his team, have shrunk in stature ever since.
Such mistakes were not often punished with such efficacy last season, but even if they were, Everton could still play a trump card or two. Now those aces have turned into jokers. Tim Cahill has run out of puff. Marcus Bent has forgotten how to shoot. Tony Hibbert and Leon Osman, the two youngsters who played like men last season, are showing their age.
It is at times like these that players look to a manager for inspiration. Anything will do - a new signing, a fresh training-ground innovation, something to stir the stale air. But Moyes seems dangerously short of ideas. Simon Davies and Phil Neville have added brio and bite respectively, but the Scot's other purchases - James Beattie, Matteo Ferrari and Nuno Valente - have become part of the problem rather than solutions to it.
Per Kroldrup and Andy van der Mayde, bought at a combined cost of £7 million, have yet to kick a ball.
Beattie is a particular concern. The striker arrived from Southampton in order to fill the boots of Duncan Ferguson, but on present form he is not even fit to clean them. Beattie has been unfortunate with injuries, but there comes a point when a player's fitness is a reflection of his attitude. Moyes was aware of the former England forward's dubious track record when he signed him for £6 million, so it is only right that he should take his share of the blame now that things seem to have gone wrong.
It is too early to speculate on Moyes' future. There was a reason why he was touted as a possible assistant - and even successor - to Alex Ferguson, and the qualities which allowed him to lift Everton to new heights should eventually effect a recovery.
If nothing else, this tumultuous start to the season has taught Moyes a lesson in humility. "I make mistakes every day and that is why I am always looking for ways to improve," he said. "There isn't anyone out there who doesn't make mistakes."
He is right, but it is how he learns from his errors that will decide Everton's fate.
