The youthful zest of Dan Gosling and Jack Rodwell’s that did for Manchester United suggests Everton’s outlook might be rosier than that of their neighbours

Upwardly mobile Scottish manager establishing a reputation as skilled team builder sends on two youngsters to defeat big-name opponent. Remind you of anyone? David Moyes, a mini Sir Alex Ferguson, lost Wayne Rooney to Manchester United but can still pull a wizard from an academy.

First Dan Gosling, then Jack Rodwell: Moyes reached into Everton’s own heritage of home cultivation to inflict a sixth Premier League defeat on United. This, on a day when the barnstorming Rooney seemed temporarily to have run out of gas. On the ground where he burst out of Croxteth as a pugnacious 16-year-old with hellfire eyes, Rooney surrendered the limelight for an afternoon to Gosling, 20, and Rodwell, an 18-year-old from the golfing town of Birkdale who looks a certainty to wear full England colours.

Gosling’s tap-in was a routine finish after a piercing first-half drive from Diniyar Bilyaletdinov had nullified Dimitar Berbatov’s opener for the guests. But Rodwell subverted that United trademark, the audacity of youth, to gather the ball 30 yards out and set off on a diagonal goal-scoring trot that was redolent of another England striker and boyhood Everton fan now in United’s ranks.

To compare Rodwell’s fourth goal in blue to Michael Owen’s against Argentina at the 1998 World Cup would be to invite the attentions of the hyperbole police. Yet the late teenage years confer a free-spiritedness that older players know only from their scrapbooks.

Rodwell, a rangy, elegant, athletic midfielder who is tipped by some to end up as a centre-back, might have had consolidation on his mind as Everton led the English champions by Gosling’s goal with only a minute left of regular time. But football’s brightest boys don’t think that way. They aim not to close games down but to change their outcomes. So Rodwell ran at another highly-regarded youngster – Jonny Evans – befuddling the United defender with the angle of his run. He then fired right-to-left past Edwin van der Sar to put the game beyond United’s scampering reach.

In not much more than a month Everton have conquered Manchester City, Chelsea, Sporting Lisbon and now United. No wonder Moyes said: “Everton as a football club is going places.” Most impressive is his talent for blending home-developed colts with cast-offs from bigger clubs while also taking calculated gambles on foreign talent.

Their starting line-up included three mainstays who had fallen fractionally below United’s higher standards or, in Louis Saha’s case, had become too infirm to persevere with. Saha, who scored both in last week’s 2-1 win over Chelsea, has menaced centre-halves every time he has shown up fit. Ask Evans and Wes Brown, United’s second-choice pairing in the absence of Nemanja Vidic and Rio Ferdinand. Tim Howard and Phil Neville are the other United discards who have flourished at Goodison Park.

Excursions into the foreign talent market usually come off for Moyes. Bilyaletdinov applies his ability patchily but is blessed with creativity and struck an exquisite equaliser that made a statue of Van der Sar. Landon Donovan, David Beckham’s colleague at Los Angeles’ Home Depot Centre, has taken to Premier League combat with great verve. “Landon said he had the flu. I told him – people from Los Angeles don’t get flu,” Moyes said. Donovan sprinted around demonically without calling once for a hankie.

But as clubs strive to survive the economic winter there is no greater pleasure than finding a match-winner among the fresh faces of the academy. Gosling (technically a Plymouth Argyle graduate) and Rodwell came on for Bilyaletdinov and Pienaar respectively and injected the extra energy needed to counteract the arrivals of Paul Scholes for Berbatov and Gabriel Obertan for Park Ji-sung, whose industry disguised his innocuousness.

“We knew Dan Gosling’s got a goal in him and Jack was making up for a small mistake he made in mid-week,” Moyes said. The Everton manager thinks the club’s best young hope since Rooney is still too raw to be effective as a holding midfielder: “I think for now he’s better doing what he did today and breaking on. His size says he must be a defensive midfielder but what he did today is what he is. He’s got good composure and technique but there are other things he needs to add to his game.”

Lurking in that assessment might be discouragement for potential predators, United included. It would be depressing for Everton’s supporters to imagine Old Trafford taking Rooney and Rodwell while Howard and a fragile Saha come the other way. Losing Rooney, an inevitability given Everton’s inability to match United’s rates of pay, was bound to make Moyes more wary of over-promoting the club’s own local discoveries.

Whatever the stresses of talent-retention, this is an impressive Everton side who can also call on Tim Cahill, Marouane Fellaini and Phil Jagielka. There is a debate to be had now about which side of Stanley Park is the rosier. Liverpool have more assets but much greater debt. Everton have stability and evolutionary force. And they have Moyes.

Premier LeagueEvertonDavid MoyesPaul Haywardguardian.co.uk