Battered and bruised Everton must turn the end of Goodison into a new beginning | Jonathan Liew

Weather the storm of the famous ground’s final league derby and it can be a renewal for a club going nowhere for so long

The deluge came earlier this week, with a bitterly appropriate sense of timing. As the precursor to the approaching Storm Darragh emptied its load over the north-west of England, video footage showed the stands and stairways of Everton’s new stadium cascading with rainwater, filling and flooding the concourses beneath.

Which – in an ideal world – is probably not the image you want people to conjure up when they think of your new £760m waterfront stadium, built on a floodplain, surrounded on three sides by the River Mersey and expected to withstand decades of climate change and devastating sea level rises.

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