A quarter-century on, St Yates’ Day seems less replicable than ever

Twenty-five years ago today, backed by more than 6,000 fans, Tranmere Rovers ventured six miles through the Mersey tunnel and dismantled Everton, their condescending overlords, 0-3, at Goodison Park. 

A sublime strike from the prodigious Jason Koumas sandwiched a brace from veteran defender Steve Yates as the waifs and strays of Birkenhead humiliated the aristocrats of Liverpool.

Arguably the greatest result ever authored by Tranmere, comparative minnows in the big city shadows, the paroxysm is forever remembered as St Yates’ Day – a quasi-public holiday for downtrodden Rovers fans who are otherwise ribbed by well-to-do relatives, friends, colleagues and classmates.

Indeed, the hallowed victory still resonates because Liverpool and Everton fans look down on Rovers – if they look at them at all. ‘The Merseyside derby’ is considered exclusively blue and red, an afront to Tranmere’s existence, while Rovers are typically portrayed as the annoying younger sibling or the forgotten ugly cousin despite a rich, rebellious heritage of their own.

The mythos of Dixie Dean is a useful microcosm in this regard. Rovers found the incorrigible ragamuffin on the cobbled streets of Birkenhead; kickstarted his professional career; then watched without credit – and only a meagre £3,000 transfer fee – as the world fell in love with an Everton hero.

Unsurprisingly, then, Tranmere had never beaten Everton before the fateful duel of 2001. In fact, three previous meetings yielded an aggregate score of 10-0 in favour of the Toffees. And despite enduring mid-table mediocrity under Walter Smith, all but the daft and dangerous among the 39,207 inside Goodison that day expected a similarly serene outcome. After all, Rovers were mired in a second-tier relegation battle under John Aldridge, and Premiership quality figured to win out – regardless of Gwladys Street grumbles.

Of course, the actual events of that immortal afternoon – the sacred, sepia-tinged silhouettes – are, by now, well-worn. Yates’ looping header over Thomas Myhre, hanging for eons in suspended potentiality. Koumas’ majestic swoop over the same stranded Norwegian, the most re-enacted Rovers goal ever on the playgrounds of Birkenhead. And Yates’ thunderous second, a bullet header before the Gwladys after high-stepping through a statuesque home defence. Nil-three. Game over. The greatest hour in the 142-year history of Tranmere Rovers.

Sadly – though somewhat predictably, given the media’s routine ignorance of Tranmere – this remarkable result is rarely mentioned further afield. When sparse lists of the ‘greatest FA Cup upsets’ are hastily regurgitated following the latest giant-killing, Rovers’ Goodison insurrection is rarely – if ever – highlighted. Nevertheless, in terms of a lower league club pummelling a local top-tier rival on their own ground, it is almost without equal in the modern history of English football. 

More worryingly than mainstream amnesia, though, St Yates’ Day has become a dusty outlier in Rovers’ own milieu. With each year, the memories fade a little more. The chants of, “Are you Chester in disguise?” The Evertonians applauding our players after booing their own. That one incensed blue nose who encroached onto the pitch only to be hauled away by police. It all seems so long ago, and there is a stark unreality to it all. Sometimes, it feels like it never actually happened – especially to newer, younger fans – and that speaks to a sombre devolution of hope.

A quarter-century on, indeed, Tranmere beating Everton away seems less replicable than ever. Always large, the gulf between lower league teams and their Premier League counterparts is now gargantuan. Spiralling socioeconomic trends – from the scandalous Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP) and runaway television deals to sweeping corporatisation and vast infrastructure projects – have supercharged the haves while emaciating the have-nots. Football has morphed into a zero-sum game beholden to money, and sprats like Tranmere cannot compete with whales like Everton, let alone sharks like Liverpool, thanks to a managed kleptocracy that drains proletariat passion.

Once upon a time, of course, Rovers were serial giant-killers, with runs to the League Cup semi-final (1994) and final (2000) complemented by a recent FA Cup quarter-final berth (2000). Indeed, when the deadly submarine traversed the Mersey to Goodison, Tranmere had already beaten five Premiership teams – Coventry, West Ham, Middlesbrough and Sunderland – in the preceding 16 months.

Since St Yates’ Day, however, Rovers have played 20 games against top-flight opposition – winning three, drawing three and losing 14 while conceding 60 goals. In three matches against Tottenham alone, Tranmere have lost by a combined score of 15-0, while Swansea and Manchester United both put six past our faltering heroes. In fact, aside from an incongruous win over Watford in 2020, Rovers went 16 years without beating a Premier League side.

Such a statistic is highly subjective, because opportunities to take Premier League scalps are irregularly meted out by sheer fortune. Yet while, quantifiably, cup upsets do still occur – see Macclesfield beating Crystal Palace and Grimsby toppling Manchester United this season alone – there is an empirical sense of increased scarcity regarding giant-killings. Especially those where a lower league team beats its close Premier League rival.

In fairness, that anecdotal frustration – and Rovers’ undoubted profligacy – could be unique to Wirral’s finest rather than speaking to an all-encompassing trend. Certainly, Tranmere have suffered a tangible decline in the past 25 years, with four relegations and a brief non-league sabbatical attributable to myopic mismanagement. Prentonia may have used its lifetime allocation of pixie dust, ultimately, rather than cup giant-killings becoming an endangered species. Regardless, to us Rovers fans, it doesn’t really matter – the sense of hopelessness is the same.

Sheer financial data substantiates the doom. Back in 2001, Everton posted annual revenues of £32.8 million; Tranmere, £5.02 million – an eight-fold difference. (1) (2) By contrast, Everton most recently reported revenues of £186.9 million; Tranmere, £5.9 million – a 31-fold canyon. (3) (4) According to Spotrac, meanwhile, Everton currently have an annual wage bill of £63.7 million, whereas Tranmere pay their squad less than £4 million, and perhaps by a lot, depending on the source you trust – a gulf of close to 1,500%. (5) 

I’m admittedly pessimistic as a lifelong Rovers fan. Fatalistic defence mechanisms are hardwired into our psyche. That said, right now, it feels nigh on impossible for Tranmere to beat a blue-chip Premier League club in the familiar mode of yore. The macroeconomics of modern football, and the micro mismanagement unique to Tranmere, have created a club that is currently unable to compete beyond the lower reaches of League Two. That is the sobering reality, I’m afraid, and arguing otherwise is futile.

Besides, even if St Yates’ Day, or something similar, were to reoccur, it would just look a whole lot different nowadays. Goodison Park is now all but mothballed, replaced by a 53,000-seat spaceship at Bramley-Moore Dock. VAR would probably find some innocuous infringement 90 seconds before one of Yates’ goals, chalking it off and stunting euphoric celebrations. And overall, clinical commerce would replace rustic romance as the lens through which the aberration was viewed.

At this point, then, St Yates’ Day is a relic of bygone daydreams. Hope is the elixir of delusion among diehard fans, and it springs eternal in the Tranmere breast, but with reduced conviction and potency nowadays. With a shadow of learned helplessness and an echo of knowing apathy.

There are still kids who dream of beating Everton and Liverpool while wearing the feted white of Tranmere Rovers. They still skip around the backyard, scoring improbable goals against the reds and blues of imposing imagination. But as a tangible, realistic prospect, such miracles have never seemed less likely. The odds have never been stacked higher against Rovers, while Liverpool and Everton have never seemed more imperious.

A big money takeover looms on the horizon for Tranmere, we are routinely promised, though it shimmers as an unsettling mirage rather than a reassuring revolution. Just as Peel Holdings has, for decades, pledged to plonk skyscrapers on the Birkenhead waterfront, aping the modernity of Liverpool, the mythic new owners of Tranmere may speak of new stadiums and Premier League roadmaps. Until we see it with our own eyes, however, it is all just rhetoric. It is all just florid fiction. And so, we sit and wait, pondering a surreal past and a future unlikely to replicate it.

Sources

1. Limited, Everton Football Club Company. Annual Report and Statement of Accounts 2001. Companies House. [Online] April 3, 2002. https://www.toffeeweb.com/club/business/annual_reports/AnnualReport01.pdf.

2. Club, Tranmere Rovers Football. Report and Financial Statements for the Year Ended 30 June 2001. Companies House. [Online] April 29, 2002. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/00118587/filing-history/MTUxODM0OTczYWRpcXprY3g/document?format=pdf&download=0.

3. Limited, Everton Football Club Company. Annual Report & Accounts 2024. Companies House. [Online] April 2, 2025. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/00036624/filing-history/MzQ2MTAzMDcwMmFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf&download=0.

4. Limited, Tranmere Rovers Football Club. Annual Report and Financial Statements for the Year Ended 30 June 2024. Companies House. [Online] April 7, 2025. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/00118587/filing-history/MzQ2MTM1MTkwMmFkaXF6a2N4/document?format=pdf&download=0.

5. Everton FC 2025-26 Payroll Table. Spotrac. [Online] https://www.spotrac.com/epl/everton-fc/payroll.