David Moyes Slams ‘Dead Stupid’ Question Over Everton’s Carabao Cup Ambitions

A question about cup ambition was never going to sit well with David Moyes this week. Asked how important the Carabao Cup was to him this season, the Everton manager turned the press conference into something closer to a cross-examination, accusing the reporter in front of him of asking something “dead stupid.”

The exchange came as Moyes previewed a Carabao Cup second-round tie at Preston North End, the club where he first learned his trade as a manager. It produced one of the more heated media moments of his second spell at Everton, and it laid bare a tension every Premier League manager outside the traditional top six lives with: how do you chase a trophy without gambling on the one competition that actually pays the bills.

“Are those journalists dead stupid?”

The trouble started with what looked, on paper, like a routine question. A reporter asked Moyes how important the cup competitions were to him this season. He did not let it go.

“I think it’s a question that every journalist asks every manager,” Moyes said. “In some ways, I think are those journalists dead stupid? Do you think none of the managers want to win the cups? Of course we all want to win the cups… so the answer is yes, the cups are hugely important.”

He was not finished. Moyes turned the question back on the reporter, asking which he thought was more important, winning a cup or staying in the Premier League. When the answer came back no to the cup, he had his response ready.

“Would it be more important to win a cup than to stay in the Premier League?” Moyes asked. When the journalist replied no, he delivered his conclusion: “So, there we go. You’ve half answered it.”

It was a blunt way of making a point Moyes has made before in different words. Everton last lifted a major trophy in 1995, when they won the FA Cup, and the wait has now stretched past three decades. Every August brings fresh questions about ending that run, and every August Moyes has to balance the answer against the much harder job in front of him: keeping Everton in the Premier League and building something that lasts.

A return to where it all began

The setting made the moment sharper. Preston North End is not just Wednesday’s opponent. It is the club that gave Moyes his first managerial job in February 1998, when Preston were fighting to stay out of the third tier of English football. He kept them up, then took them into the second tier the following season. Preston are still competing in the Championship today, four divisions and two and a half decades removed from the club Moyes first took charge of.

Two years later, in 2001, Moyes came within one match of taking Preston into the Premier League, only for his side to lose the second-tier play-off final to Bolton Wanderers at the Millennium Stadium. He left for Everton the following year, the first of what are now two spells in charge at Goodison Park, and Wednesday marks his first match back at Deepdale.

That history gave Wednesday’s tie a different texture to a routine early-season cup fixture, even if Moyes was not about to let sentiment distract from the job at hand. Everton go into the game looking to avoid a repeat of last season, when they exited the Carabao Cup early to Wolves. A cup run this time would offer some relief from a trophy drought every Everton manager has inherited over the past three decades, but Moyes made clear this week that relief has limits.

The balancing act every manager outside the elite faces

Moyes’ irritation says as much about the position Everton occupy as it does about one prickly exchange with a reporter. Clubs fighting relegation cannot afford to treat domestic cups as a priority in the way Manchester City or Arsenal might. Squad depth is thinner, injuries hurt more, and a heavy cup run can collide directly with a run of league fixtures that decide whether a club stays in the division that generates its income. Managers in that position are regularly asked to explain how seriously they are taking a competition most of the country will forget by Christmas, while the club that employs them is judged, first and last, on where it finishes in the Premier League table in May.

At the same time, supporters who have watched three decades pass without a trophy are entitled to care about the Carabao Cup, the FA Cup, or anything else that might end the wait. Moyes’ response this week was not a dismissal of that hope. It was, in his own words, confirmation that the cups carry real significance for him too, delivered in a way that made clear he is tired of being asked to prove it.

The tone of the exchange fits a manager who has spent his career being judged on pragmatism rather than glamour. Moyes built his reputation at Preston by keeping a struggling club up and then pushing it through the divisions, not by walking into a job already set up to win things. Wednesday’s trip to Deepdale is a reminder of where that reputation was built, even as he tries to shake off the suggestion that a cup competition should define how seriously he takes this season.

What happens next

Everton’s immediate priority remains the Premier League, where Moyes has been rebuilding a squad capable of pushing away from the bottom half of the table. The Carabao Cup offers a route to the club’s first trophy in more than thirty years, but as Moyes made clear this week, it will not come at the expense of the job he was actually brought back to do.

Whether Wednesday’s tie eases any of that pressure or adds to it, the exchange in the build-up said plenty about where Moyes’ patience currently sits. Asked one more time to explain how much the cups mean to him, he all but dared the room to ask again.