“My Only Hat-trick And I Scored Two For Everton And One For Watford!”

Derek Mountfield relives some fond memories of past meetings with today’s opponents, and how he can have few regrets from a football career in which he enjoyed huge success with Everton in the mid-1980s...

- Paul McNamara

Derek Mountfield is wading through the highlights of his glittering Everton career, one by one. It takes some time. All told, he concludes, winning a European trophy with his club tops the lot – off the pitch, at least.

The FA Cup was fantastic – but a “sprint”, twice winning the league title, for its demonstration of “consistency, professionalism, organisation and understanding is well up there as one of my highs”.

It is when Mountfield recalls Everton’s European Cup Winners’ Cup triumph, however, that his eyes gain an iridescent hue. “To be part of the only Everton team to have reached a European final, and then to win it, was very, very special,” he says, with unmistakable emphasis on the final three words of his sentence.

A goalscoring centre-half without parallel, in a mid-‘80s era he recalls for its “heavy pitches, crunching tackles, black eyes and broken noses”, Mountfield’s Everton career fell short of the mark in only one respect.

He spent six years at Goodison Park without scoring a hat-trick – not as we know it, anyway.

“We played Watford at home in the 1986/87 season, won 3-2 and I scored a hat-trick,” Mountfield tells Everton’s matchday programme.

“But when I tried to take the match ball from the referee, he said, ‘The own goals don’t count!’. My only hat-trick and I scored two for Everton and one for Watford.”

Mention of these two clubs in the same breath has Evertonian minds instinctively conjuring images of 1984 and all that… Steve Sherwood dumped in the back of the net by Andy Gray, Elton John’s tears and, above all, the bold line drawn under the Toffees’ 14-year trophy drought.